ARIA: Scoping Our Planet Programme

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 8th July 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Clement-Jones]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency’s handling of an Environmental Information Regulations request regarding its “Scoping Our Planet” programme.

[The Minister of State, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (Lord Vallance of Balham) (Lab)]

ARIA fully complies with its responsibilities under the Environmental Information Regulations. ARIA is committed to transparency; it publishes regular information on its programmes in its annual reports and accounts, in the corporate plan and through the quarterly transparency disclosures on its website. It publishes its responses to all EIR requests.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister mentions ARIA being committed to transparency, but that highlights the fact that it is not subject to the general freedom of information provisions under the ARIA Act. I note that on Report on the ARIA Bill the Labour Opposition Front Bench signed and supported in a Division an amendment tabled by me to bring ARIA into the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. In fact, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington, said:

“The Government’s determination to keep ARIA’s projects and decision-making secret is worrying. This is a matter of principle: do they believe in transparency, or not?”—[Official Report, 14/12/2021; col. 209.]


I can now ask the same question of this Labour Government: do they believe in transparency? Will they bring ARIA within the Freedom of Information Act?

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. I know that he is prone to shaking his head when Ministers answer. I fear that I may give him a neck injury during this answer.

Of course we are committed to transparency, but we have no plans to bring ARIA into the scope of the FoI Act. ARIA is a unique organisation with unique freedoms; it has been designed deliberately to be a small, agile body with limited administrative capacity so that most of its efforts can be spent devoted to finding the answers to some of the missions that it funds —long-term transformation research for the benefit of the UK. However, both the Government and ARIA understand the importance of transparency, and ARIA publishes all its information on recipients of programme funding, transactional information on its operational costs, and data on the regional distribution of its programmes and funding. It complies with the Environmental Information Regulations, is audited annually by the NAO, and publishes its annual reports and accounts.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister’s arguments are sounding dangerously like those made by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, on Report, which I am sure he will be delighted by. Does he accept that DARPA is covered by US freedom of information legislation, whereas ARIA is not?

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

DARPA is a much larger organisation and the ARPA family overall probably has close to 1,000 people working in it in total. DARPA is covered by the US Act, but it has a much larger base and many more people working with it. As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, the amount of information that ARIA puts in the public domain is more than that of almost any other body in the world.