My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord. He is completely right when he says that climate is a broad enough canvas on which people can paint. Broadly speaking, I do not mind painters and artists painting whatever they like, whenever they like, on whatever they like—if I am not paying for it. But we are paying for this, and it is not unreasonable for us to say that we would like ARIA to turn its attention primarily to the climate emergency, the very thing that is threatening our existence on this planet. That is a sufficiently exciting challenge to set ARIA.
The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, was very persuasive and I understand the attraction of allowing maximum freedom, but the risk is that it becomes directionless. For a quite small organisation, as ARIA is, that is a risk, so my view is that ARIA needs a core mission.
The Government want ARIA to have maximum flexibility and be able to back projects as it sees fit, free of any political interference or unnecessary bureaucracy. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, explained very well how deadening that could be. We certainly have no wish to enter into the kind of situation he described, but a research focus or a mission could be achieved without that risk. He said that no one could have set
out to achieve the moon landings without being able to look back and build on existing technology. That is completely right, but we do not have the luxury of that at this moment. We have a very real, immediate risk that we need to address, which is why we favour making the mission one of climate.
We all want ARIA to succeed. This is quite a good Bill from a cross-party working point of view because we all want it to work, but asking the board to come up with its own mission—or, even worse, not having a mission at all—would not assist ARIA and could set it up with a weakness, or even to fail. We all need direction, purpose and a sense that what we are doing is contributing to a greater good, so telling ARIA to back any scientific research and to do what it sees fit would be a mistake. The board will anyway spend its first few months deciding how it is going to make decisions. We are not attempting to tell it how to do that, but it would have no framework or sense of the UK’s priorities, and I just do not think that is necessary. It would be a mistake and, if we corrected it, that would not diminish ARIA in any way; in fact, it would be strengthened.
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Amendment 1, Amendment 21 in my name and Amendment 26 seek to assist ARIA by setting its mission as supporting innovation that would help to combat climate change. It seems obvious to many of us, following the conclusion of COP 26 last weekend, that we have to move faster on this issue. The role for technology, science and invention is obvious. Governments need to act with speed and to work to a strategy, so setting up ARIA and not asking it to work on climate as our national priority just seems like a massive missed opportunity. If we do not set that objective, we will look back and wonder why.
It is our Government’s job to move decisively in this area. New technologies need to be scaled up and grown, but first they need to be invented and that is an obvious role for ARIA. Innovation needs to happen quicker than the planet is warming. That means an active state doing everything we can with our universities, research community and venture capital. I hope I do not need to go into all the arguments that we have heard in Glasgow over the last couple of weeks, and I hope no one in this Room still needs to be convinced of the need to address climate change. Suffice it to say that food insecurity, infrastructure vulnerability, mass migration and civil unrest are some of the existing and anticipated effects. ARIA’s £800 million would be a drop in the ocean but it might just be the catalyst we need to bring about the innovation that could make a difference.
Buildings with energy-efficient heating, cooling and lighting, the gene editing of crops, protein substitutes, waste heat recovery, hydrogen, advances in renewable energy—there are people in this Room who know far more about these things than I do—are just some of the technologies in need of support that are already proving capable of having an impact on temperature rises, and newer technologies are still emerging that ARIA is perfectly placed to invest in. Some of those could be considered moonshot ideas, but surely that is the point of ARIA.
My Amendment 21 suggests that ARIA might have regard to that as its core mission. It would need to publish a statement every two years—that does not seem too onerous, bearing in mind the warning of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts—on the steps it would take with regard to the mission. I suggest that the mission should be Section 1 of the Climate Change Act, and thereafter ARIA’s mission would be set every five years and approved by regulation. I accept that there may be other mechanisms by which to implement the aim of providing ARIA with a mission. If others, perhaps even the Minister, wish to suggest some then I am sure they will have our support.
It might help if I explain the thinking behind expecting ARIA’s mission to be approved by Parliament. If the Government were to agree to making climate the priority, there would be strong cross-party support and the agency would get off on a strong footing; everyone would be willing it on. As things stand, we all know that ARIA’s early decisions—whatever the Government attempt to do later in the Bill about transparency, or the lack of it—are going to be picked over and could be used to undermine the agency, and we do not want that to happen. Giving it a mission that was understood and supported would be in ARIA’s interests. There is no doubt that the agency’s activities will become known one way or another, and the lack of transparency combined with the lack of a mission is just a recipe for political pressure and concern in future, which none of us wants to see happen.
Amendment 25, proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, seeks to prevent ARIA duplicating research funding by UKRI; that seems sensible and I am interested in the Minister’s response to that. The explanatory statement for the noble Lord’s Amendment 27 says that it
“would provide a framework for the decisions about projects by the Agency”.
Having listened to the noble Lord, I can see why he is suggesting that. Clearly, I prefer my amendment, but I wonder whether the Minister thinks the noble Lord’s amendment might in some way assist the agency.