My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions. I was delighted to hear the defence of basic research made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and the point he made about bureaucracy in the rest—it should be said, the larger part—of research funding was well made and echoed many of the Second Reading comments.
However, there is a danger that we are taking the DARPA bait a little too seriously. The Government have played this into all their communications. Let us look at what we are comparing. DARPA has a huge budget, many times bigger than even the best budget we could expect for ARIA. It has been there for decades. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, mentioned Mariana Mazzucato. What she is very good at is pointing out how the technologies developed in DARPA have then been picked up by technology businesses within the United States, some of them part of the
“military-industrial complex”, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, put it, but of course Apple is one of her best examples and even the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, might have one of those to hand. The mobilisation of this technology is absolutely key, which is why what the noble Lord, Lord Broers, had to say was so important and why the project management part is such a central point.
I refer back to the points that started to be made through Amendment 25, proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. At Second Reading, the Minister deployed the words of Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, the chief executive of UKRI. He quoted her telling the Public Bill Committee in the other place that
“the priorities that the Government and Ministers set to solve particular challenges for the nation … fall very much within the UKRI remit”.—[Official Report, Commons, Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill Committee, 14/4/21; col. 8]
The implication—and almost the stated point—was that because UKRI is covering this, there is no need for ARIA to cover it.
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We should also take the Minister at his word. Throughout the debate so far the Minister has asserted that the way in which ARIA will tackle challenges will be fundamentally different from how UKRI will do it. That appears to be the Minister’s central point for having ARIA in the first place. If he means what he says, and the Government mean what they say, there is no worry in having these two organisations setting off to work in similar areas, because they will tackle the problems in different ways, and one has substantially different aims from the other. Therefore, I am not so exercised by this issue as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, obviously is, because clearly there will be problems that both ARIA and those sponsored by UKRI will work on, and they may have the same direction but the route to solve them will be different—and there is more than one way to solve a problem.
I shall speak to Amendments 1, 21 and 26, to which I put my name. I congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Browne, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, on tabling the amendments.
The purpose of Amendment 1, as we heard, is to provide a broad sustainability purpose for ARIA. Amendment 21 is to ensure a broader mission, and Amendment 26 would tighten that mission around net zero—all of them pointing in the same direction. Some noble Lords were unable to speak at Second Reading because they were at COP 26. For anybody who has had any doubts around the centrality of technology in helping us meet our climate goals, I hope that those doubts have been dismissed by the events. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, talked about “shiny things” with regard to technology, which made it sound as though she did not approve of it—but I think that she probably does. I do not know.
Technologies such as carbon capture and storage, hydrogen fuel cells, and energy storage are all going to edge us towards our goal. I expect the Minister to step up and say: “Ah, yes, these technologies are already very much part of the UKRI agenda.” I agree—but one thing is clear: the current technology envisioned, which is already in research, will not alone do the job. You do
not have to listen just to Greta Thunberg to believe that. I had the words “unknown unknowns” in my speech, as well; there are unknown unknowns that need to be discovered and invented to get us to our goal. It is quite clear that these leaps in technology are absolutely going to be needed if we are to get close to the greenhouse gas goals that we have set ourselves. The Minister might agree with that.
Amendment 27, proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, which I believe is a great improvement on the wording of Clause 3, talks about
“transformational effects and large-scale benefits”
arising from “advances in technology”. Where do we need those most? Where do we need them more than anything? At the moment, it is around the field of climate change, where the aims have to be bold and the risks of failure may be higher, but the rewards are vital.
To this end, if we are to take the Minister’s Second Reading speech at face value, what better institution is there to undertake this bold research than ARIA itself? This is a field in which researchers and scientists must not be held back by the fear of failure and in which the stakes are existential for many communities. That is why Amendments 1, 21 and 26, which bear my name, are really important. They seek to make that existential challenge the focus of what this institute will do initially.
Throughout the debates so far, the Minister’s tone has been that it is not for us to set the direction of ARIA. He says the chair and CEO will be at the helm, supported by the board, and that these officeholders will be the arbiters of ARIA’s direction. This is UK citizens’ money. ARIA will spend at least £500 million over this Parliament, with £300 million more if the next Government decide to honour it. It is not unreasonable for the UK Parliament to focus this money on the number one problem that will affect people—not just people in the UK who are stumping up the cash but our nearest and, indeed, most far-flung neighbours.
When this research centre was first mooted, it was in the context of it tackling a moonshot project. I do not think we need to look that far into the solar system.