Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, there is surely general agreement of the worthwhileness of ARIA’s goals. What is less clear is whether the small, stand-alone administrative construct conceived in the Bill is optimal, or indeed necessary, for achieving these goals, especially given the multi-layered and complex structure for science governance that already exists.

Not long ago, we had the major reorganisation of science funding that led to UKRI, introducing a layer of administration above the established research councils, such as the MRC. We have also had Innovate UK, and this year two high-level advisory bodies have been set up to oversee all this, adding yet another layer to the hierarchy. Surely we should be cautious about establishing another entity before these changes are bedded in and prove their worth. As the Minister said, 50 times more funds are spent on existing institutions than are envisaged for ARIA. The priority should surely be to ensure the maximum efficiency and minimal bureaucratic problems in these other organisations.

Confidence and high morale drive creativity, innovation and risk-taking. This is true in blue-skies science and equally true in the often greater challenges of the development of new products or businesses. A motive for ARIA is the perception that existing institutions cannot offer this, but the best institutions still do—I am lucky to work in one. But even in these privileged environments, there are dark problems ahead. My younger colleagues seem even more preoccupied with grant cuts, proposal writing, job security and suchlike. Prospects of breakthroughs will plummet if such concerns prey unduly on the minds of even the best young researchers. Worse still, the profession will not then attract the most ambitious talent from the next generation, nor draw in foreign talents. Many of us worry that the UK’s traditional strengths are consequently in jeopardy.

However, these negative perceptions can be reversed. I will mention two specific gripes that can be addressed. The first is that bodies that allocate public funds focus on ever more detailed performance indicators to quantify the output. This has the best of intentions, but its actual consequences are often the reverse: to constrain long-term thinking and prevent even a minority from having the privilege of fully focusing on long-term problems. The second bugbear is the REF, which is not only burdensome for universities but offering perverse incentives to researchers that discourage risk-taking.

The difference in pay-off between the very best research and the merely good is, by any realistic measure, hundreds of per cent. What is crucial in giving taxpayers enhanced value for money is maximising the chance of the big breakthroughs by backing the judgment of those with the best credentials and supporting them appropriately. Research universities do this and should be cherished. They benefit the nation through direct knowledge transfer from their labs to industry and through the quality of the students they feed into all walks of life. Moreover, high-profile academics can seize on a promising idea from anywhere in the world and run with it. Let us not forget that, despite the UK’s strength, at least 90% of the best ideas come from the rest of the world.

Despite these strengths, our universities are not always the most propitious environments for projects that demand intense and sustained effort. Dedicated laboratories such as the LMB are, in some contexts, preferable. Indeed, our national strength in biomedical sciences stems from the existence of laboratories allowing full-time long-term research, which is getting ever harder in today’s universities. Moreover, UK government funding is massively supplemented by the Wellcome Trust, the cancer charities and a strong pharmaceutical industry. To ensure effective exploitation of new discoveries, research institutions must be complemented by organisations, whether in the public or private sector, that can offer adequate manufacturing capability when needed. This fortunate concatenation certainly proved its worth in the recent pandemic. Government and private laboratories are crucial in health, plant science and energy. We may need more of them, and also more innovative ways perhaps of ensuring that IP generated here is optimally exploited.

However, given this complex ecology, do we need an ARIA organisation to achieve ARIA’s aims? This does not seem clear. ARIA’s proponents think that UKRI’s bureaucratic features are chronic—that we must be fatalistic about this and offer a lucky few the chance to bypass it. Indeed, UKRI has a very broad mission and is working hard to reduce bureaucracy, but much of it is imposed by government regulations. Can the Minister tell us why there could not be within UKRI a separate fund for supporting some projects in the ARIA style via a ring-fenced part of its budget that was less constrained by Cabinet Office and Treasury controls, which slow things up and constrain experimentation in funding allocation mechanisms? Could the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, a pan-UKRI programme, also achieve some of ARIA’s goals if bureaucratic constraints on it were loosened?

Finally, retaining our scientific standing is crucial. The UK will decline economically unless it can ensure that some of the key creative ideas of the 21st century germinate here and, even more, are exploited here. Unless we get smarter, we will get poorer.

Square Kilometre Array Observatory (Immunities and Privileges) Order 2020

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Monday 14th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the Minister’s statement should surely be welcomed and uncontroversial. I have no specific involvement to declare, but as Astronomer Royal I am probably one of the few Members of this House familiar with the SKA. I will therefore supplement what the Minister said by outlining for a few minutes the project’s international significance, why the UK’s central role is especially welcome and why this decision has broader long-term benefits extending beyond the science itself.

Astronomy is the grandest environmental science. We are trying to discover the whole “zoo” of objects the cosmos contains—galaxies, stars, planets, black holes, et cetera. Just as Darwin showed how we and our biosphere evolved from the first life on the young earth about 4 billion years ago, we are trying to go back further and trace how the solar system and all the atoms in it emerged from some mysterious beginning nearly 14 billion years ago.

We can also learn new basic physics by observing phenomena where nature has, as it were, created conditions and done experiments we could never simulate in the lab. Within a decade, incidentally, we can observe planets around other stars to check whether they might harbour life. This subject has become a “big science” advanced by international consortia—indeed, in optical astronomy the European Southern Observatory, to which we in the UK belong, has a world lead. It has the biggest and best optical telescope currently and the one now being built will also be a world-beater.

Moreover, other kinds of radiation, not just optical but radio waves, reveal just as much as visible light. Indeed, much of the gas in the universe is hydrogen and radiates only in the radio band. Ever since the 1950s, the UK has been an international leader in radio astronomy, not least because radio waves are not stopped by clouds and rain.

However, there is a fundamental constraint. To get a sharp image of the radio sky would require a dish far bigger than those at Jodrell Bank and elsewhere—literally miles across—which is obviously out of the question. But there is another way to get sharp images. The radiation gathered from an array of separate dishes can be combined to create a map of the radio sky as sharp as a single radio dish the size of the earth.

The SKA exploits this amazing technique, which incidentally was first developed by Martin Ryle in Cambridge in the 1960s. It will comprise hundreds of dishes, with a total surface area of a square kilometre—hence its name—but these dishes will be spread over a large geographical region. Perhaps the biggest challenge, to which the Minister alluded, is the huge computer power needed to combine and process the data flow from all the dishes in the array.

Such an array cannot be built in Britain. It needs large, open and sparsely populated areas. After years of international discussion, two optimal sites were found in the southern hemisphere which have scientific and geopolitical advantages. Half the array will be concentrated in remote pastoral areas of Western Australia, though some outlying dishes in that array will spread right across the continent.

The other half will be in South Africa, centred in a region of the Northern Cape known as the Karoo. Nearly 200 dishes will be concentrated in a region 100 miles across, but some outliers will spread further away into eight other African countries: Ghana, Zambia, Madagascar, Botswana, Namibia, Kenya, Mauritius and Mozambique. South Africa is already a major player in astronomy, having prioritised it for decades. To quote the relevant South African Minister:

“We are determined to ensure the success of what will be the first ever large global research infrastructure hosted in Africa”.


Participation in the SKA project has significantly strengthened South Africa’s data science capabilities, enabling it to close the gap with developed economies.

So much for the background. The SKA hardware is concentrated in two southern countries, but 15 or more nations are contributing, so it needs a governance structure established through international treaties similar to those governing two other sciences that require costly international facilities and multinational partnerships: CERN, the particle accelerator in Geneva, and the European Space Agency. I should add that the SKA is about 10 times cheaper than CERN.

The global headquarters will be the legal entity responsible for constructing and operating the telescopes in the southern hemisphere. The convention was signed, as the Minister said, in 2019 by Australia, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa and the UK. Other member nations plan to join and contribute financially and via their expertise.

It is fitting that the world’s future largest radio telescope, the SKA, will have its headquarters at Jodrell Bank—a site recently granted UNESCO world heritage status to mark its pioneering contributions to radio astronomy and the iconic telescope, now called the Lovell Telescope, which was once the world’s largest single dish in radio astronomy. Lovell’s great telescope, incidentally, was commissioned in the 1950s. It has had several updates and is now more than 60 years old, but it is still probing cosmic objects whose very existence was unknown when it was built and, by looking at pairs of neutron stars, conducting some of the most precise tests of fundamental physics and Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Likewise, there is every hope that the SKA will, via periodic upgrades which will deploy computational power beyond today’s conceptual horizon, spearhead cosmic exploration throughout much of the 21st century. It is a benign project that will have a special role in stimulating IT and data-handling in Africa and in the other member countries. It will benefit all participating states, and their number is likely to grow. It is therefore especially welcome for the UK to have a pivotal role, which will be a technological boost to us in this country as well as a boost to our international collaboration. We should surely welcome this decision today.

Science Research Funding in Universities (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB) [V]]

Our research universities are major assets because of the collective expertise of their faculties and the consequent quality of the graduates they feed into all walks of life. They are a seedbed for new ideas, some of which have major potential impact, but our top institutions will not retain their standing unless they continue to attract top talent from this country and abroad. Some nerds—I am one of them—will become researchers come what may but a world-class university cannot survive on just these weirdos. It must attract a share of ambitious young people with flexible talent—the kind who are savvy about their options and increasingly associate academia with uncertain prospects, bureaucracy and undue financial sacrifices, as measured by this report.

Even if we continue to generate 10% of the world’s best science, 90% of clever new ideas still germinate elsewhere, so we should not overfocus. The system as a whole must retain enough across-the-board expertise to sustain a “watching brief” across all global science, and thereby seize on a new idea from anywhere and run with it.

Achieving the social and economic benefits of research is a prolonged process. The inventors of lasers in the 1960s used ideas that Einstein had developed decades earlier; they could not themselves foresee that their invention would be used in eye surgery and in DVDs. Likewise, the pay-offs from, for instance, quantum computing and graphene still lie ahead.

Research universities are not optimised to spearhead long-term R&D, especially when they are constrained by perverse incentives such as the REF. That is why it is good that they are embedded in an ecosystem of small companies, NGOs and so on; that is why the catapult centres were set up. Government research establishments provide, in some areas, valuable long-term programmes. Indeed, such establishments already exist for fusion research, biomedicine and environmental science, but we need more. For instance, the new Faraday Institution for battery research—a welcome step—could be the nucleus of a larger venture, meshing public and private funds and encompassing other energy technologies.

There is an especially compelling case for prioritising energy R&D. Without innovation, we will not meet our 2050 net-zero target, but that in itself cuts global emissions by less than 2%. It is more important that these innovations could have a benign multiplier effect and perhaps accelerate the developing world’s efforts to leapfrog to clean energy. Then—I suspect the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, would approve of this—we would reduce global emissions by far more than 2% and help the developing world.

Likewise, our leadership in plant science could facilitate the switch to the sustainably intensive agriculture that is needed to feed the world’s 9 billion people by 2050. It is hard to envisage a more inspiring challenge for young scientists than providing food and energy for the developing world. We need to ensure that these scientists are educated, motivated and supported. Our schools, universities, and high-tech businesses—supplemented by national laboratories—must all match the international best if we are to prosper.