This group consists entirely of amendments in my name. Very helpfully, they have been grouped together so you do not have to hear from me too often. Helpfully, it also groups together amendments which, from my point of view, are about the way in which ARIA acquires, creates, disposes of, retains and shares intellectual property. That is what we are really on about in this group.
Amendment 18 is the simplest and least interesting of them. It bears on this same area of the Bill and the question of the supplementary powers. In Paragraph 17(2)(b), where the power is given to
“acquire and dispose of land”,
the amendment would add the words “and other property”. I may be told that it is unnecessary, but I am not quite sure that I understand why, and why land is referred to while other property is not. Very often in legislation, “land and other property” is referred to.
Amendment 19 is in the same part of the Bill. It adds a further provision, concerning the powers that ARIA would have in connection with the exercise of its functions, for it to be able to
“acquire and license intellectual property”.
Maybe it has the power to do that, but I am not quite sure why other things are referred to as being supplementary powers and why the acquisition and licensing of intellectual property should not be referenced here. The purpose of my amendments generally is to try to give ARIA as much flexibility as possible in the way in which it acquires and uses its intellectual property. This amendment would say that it has the power to acquire and license, so licensing would be a specific power that it was able to exercise.
Amendment 22 gets us back out of the schedule and on to page 2. This is the point at which, under Clause 2, ARIA may attach conditions to the financial support that it gives—so imagine the relationship between ARIA and researchers, institutes, bodies, companies or whoever. Some conditions are referenced in Clause 2(4) about financial support being repaid, property being restored or information being provided. In Amendment 22 I propose that we want to make it clear that intellectual property forms part of those conditions and that it may be held by ARIA itself under those conditions or shared with the beneficiaries of support, obviously in ways that it chooses. From my point of view, ARIA wants to be able to hold on to intellectual property in some circumstances; it definitely wants to be able to share it with the beneficiaries of support in others.
In this context, the beneficiaries of support could include researchers who themselves become part of ARIA for a time. As I mentioned at Second Reading, one of the most notable characteristics of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which used to be in my constituency, was that its researchers were able to generate, from very basic research, some applications that had substantial intellectual property value. For example, Greg Winter was at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and made discoveries that led to monoclonal antibodies. If I remember correctly, he left LMB to form companies and exploit that, and then subsequently came back to LMB to do more research.
This is the kind of interchange that I suspect we want ARIA to be able to undertake. We want it to be able to bring people in and say, “We are going to share intellectual property with you. You will be able to exploit it and we will be able to exploit it. We can set up whatever arrangements are necessary in order to do this.” Amendment 22 would explicitly allow ARIA to enter into those sorts of arrangements with those who are the beneficiaries of its financial support and indeed those who are working directly for it as short-term researchers. The nature of the programme managers and researchers will generally be fixed term and quite short term.
Amendment 28 is in a slightly different part of the Bill—the part that the noble Lord, Lord Browne, was talking about earlier, concerning grants made by the Secretary of State to ARIA itself and the conditions that may be applied. I am suggesting that there should be conditions, but conditions that in this case allow the Secretary of State, having made grants to ARIA, to allow the agency, having acquired intellectual property and value out of that research, to retain and reinvest it. That is a potentially not insignificant provision. On some occasions, for example, the LMB was generating more by way of revenue back to the Medical Research Council than the Medical Research Council was giving it in grants. DARPA in America, if I understand correctly, was investing in messenger RNA for vaccine production from 2013 and that has led to Moderna, which has valuations in the tens of billions of dollars.
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In America, there is an issue about the extent to which some of the public funding which has led to research has led to private as opposed to public gain. We want ARIA to have powers and flexibility in the conditions that the Secretary of State gives to the grants provided to it to help it not only generate substantial benefit for the economy, society, the environment and so on but also potentially extremely valuable intellectual property, which it can then retain and reinvest for its own purposes—which, obviously, are public purposes. That would be far better than having these activities simply lead to gain which is wholly transferred out into the private sector, which is a real possibility.
The public sector is perfectly capable of having such arrangements. For an organisation such as ARIA, if we are clear at the beginning that it has the flexibility to use intellectual property in these various ways, it will create exactly the right atmosphere of enterprise. What DARPA tells us in its document on its sources of success is that an entrepreneurial approach is central to some of this. We are all looking for the best scientists, researchers, programme managers and the like, but in Germany, for example, the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation is led by a tech entrepreneur, which sounds perfectly reasonable. Sometimes we need the entrepreneurial instinct at the heart of this.
For example, Mariana Mazzucato—I will not bore your Lordships, but I declare my wife’s interest here—was the Schumpeter lecturer three or four years ago and spoke on enterprise and innovation. Of course, the relationship between innovation and enterprise was the Schumpeterian thesis. We should not exclude this.
These amendments are about trying to inculcate the entrepreneurial instinct in ARIA as well as the innovation instinct. I beg to move.