Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (First sitting)

Jane Hunt Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Thank you. Mindful of time, I call Jane Hunt.

[Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)]

Q Thank you, Ms McVey. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. My question is to Professor Mazzucato and Professor Bond. In the previous session, it was very interesting what UKRI said about there being almost a language of going through the process of bidding for and gaining R&D funding in the UK, and they do it very well. But they talked about there being an area that could be developed to free up minds. How do we attract fresh ideas and thinking from some of the experts and inventors of our generation who are not always able to engage in the current R&D structure?

Professor Mazzucato: Wow, that is a fantastic question, and of course it also goes back to the education system. This may be too broad a point, but the more unequal an education system is, the less able a country is to access the full range of potential innovators, so we should always be linking up the two. Education should really be the great leveller. There is this big distinction between private and public, and even within the public and state system there are huge differences. One could even look at the whole A-level system. I once asked myself how many people in the UK study mathematics. Only a few do an A-level in maths. Do you even study calculus? In most countries, everyone, whether they become a poet, an engineer, a geologist or an English teacher, studies calculus as part of their training. Going back to the education system and looking at how it is distributed, in terms of the high quality within a country, but also regionally and by class, is a big point.

On the other part of that question, the first point that I made today is that the discussion about ARIA should not get confused with the fact that we always need curiosity-driven research. The National Science Foundation funding or the Research Councils UK funding in the UK really should reward great ideas because they are great ideas, whether or not they are talking about some big societal challenge. That should always be properly funded. Again, if you compare us with some other OECD countries, we are not necessarily on par with that.

We should have a conversation at the same time about what institutions galvanise the mix of thinking between basic and applied. That is why Vince Cable set up the catapult centres, which were modelled on the Fraunhofer institutes. The difference between Fraunhofers and catapults is not only that the German Government spend 10 times as much on Fraunhofers as we spend on catapults, but also that the same person—the same individual human being—goes from being a civil servant to being a businessperson within the Fraunhofers. There is a much less fuzzy distinction that we tend to make in the UK between the bureaucrat and the entrepreneur. That itself is a really interesting function of an agency, coming back to Professor Bond’s point that we should not have these siloed areas, with academies just doing the academies and then businesses on the other side. Finding those interesting corridors, where there is a basic needs supply but the same person breaks down the false dichotomy between bureaucrat and entrepreneur, is something that is perhaps missing in the UK’s innovation landscape.

[The Chair]

Thank you. Can I just interrupt and say that there are three minutes left and I have two questions left? Can people be to the point?

Professor Bond: I think ARIA cannot and will not address every creative mind that we have in invention, but we can do more as a nation for inventors. We can do something like Kaggle, which is a fabulous way of bringing people together. We can do more easy seeding of things, and we can have a lot more Makerspaces. Those are a couple of ideas. I could keep going on, but we do not have time.