My Lords, as co-chair of the Midlands Engine APPG, I am very supportive of the levelling-up agenda and have a lot of sympathy with the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman. My only concern is the additional bureaucracy inherent in looking at the regional distribution of investment.
Building on the point made by the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, another lesson learned from DARPA was that the headquarters of DARPA was located away from many of the main research centres of the United States, which avoided the inevitable capture of research funding by institutions in a particular area and really encouraged the take-up of ideas from all parts of the country. I thank the Minister for writing to me on this but I hope that the Government will look further at how the location of the ARIA headquarters fits into the levelling-up agenda.