My Lords, I apologise for not taking part at Second Reading; I was at the COP 26 climate talks, which are of obvious relevance to this group in particular.
I begin by reflecting on the model for ARIA—DARPA, which was of course military. We have talked a lot about risk-taking, which is usually interpreted as the risk of failure to achieve your objectives. When we think about the origins of this—the child very often showing some characteristics of its parent—we can also think about the risks attached to achieving your outcomes but causing unintended effects. With DARPA, there was Agent Orange in the Vietnam War and the drone warfare of the Gulf War, and it is now working on killer drones and robot warriors.
Looking at the model of DARPA, researcher Annie Jacobsen, author of The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, talked about how it very much became embedded in what has been described, including by US Presidents, as the military-industrial complex. Giving a mission is very important, in order to avoid institutional capture. That is one of the reasons why I speak in favour of Amendments 1, 21 and 26. We have not yet had the chance to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, but I think her Amendment 21 is in a sense similar to Amendments 1 and 26, except that it provides a more regular review mechanism.
If we think about what ARIA is for and look at some of the proposals put forward, we see that the CBI described it as
“an international lynchpin for business investment”
that is to “ultimately deliver new products”. McKernan said that it was
“a public sector, new technology seed fund”
whereas, by contrast, the Russell Group described it as
“multidisciplinary research teams with the capacity to take a holistic approach”.
That brings us to the debate that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, was just addressing, which was also raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley—and why I would express opposition to his Amendment 25. There is a danger in focusing on technology rather than on mission. We want to focus on mission and on the problems that we need to solve—and Amendment 1 very much focuses on the great problem that we need to solve. Discussion thus far has focused very much on the climate emergency, but it also talks about a “sustainable … society”.
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Technology is usually defined as being about bright, shiny metal things which will bring a solution to problems in society, whether climate or social—but do solutions lie in social innovation? To take DARPA, even during the Vietnam war, its projects involved anthropologists and sociologists. We have to ask the question, if we have a mission, of how to make sure that we do not get trapped in the idea that the answer is technology. Maybe the answer is in innovation of different kinds.
Amendment 1 aims to tackle what have been called the “wicked problems” preventing the UK and the world from meeting the sustainable development goals, goals that the UK and the whole world are signed up to solving by 2030. So this amendment, or something like it, is truly essential for this Bill in order to set this new agency on the right path, and it should be mission rather than technology led.