ARIA: Scoping Our Planet Programme

Question

14:37:00

Asked by

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.

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.

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?

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.

My Lords, I support what the Minister just said about the transparency that ARIA has managed to establish, despite the absence of freedom of information legislation. Its work in terms of requests for research and the research funding awarded are all available on its website. Would the Minister agree that ARIA has been a great success hitherto in establishing strong co-operation and relations, nationally and overseas, and bringing in some inward investments from overseas? The current CEO, Ilan Gur, should be congratulated on doing so, as he is leaving his job for personal reasons to go back to the United States.

I thank the noble Lord for his comments. I agree that ARIA has got off to a tremendous start under the leadership of Ilan Gur, who will leave his role when a new CEO is appointed—he will stay up until that point. ARIA has done a number of things, including training a whole group of people who otherwise would not be entrepreneurial scientists to be entrepreneurial scientists. Eight new start-ups have occurred as a result of this, and seven UK subsidiaries of global companies have come to the UK. The projects are all at an early stage, but there are some very exciting pieces of work that are now recognised and admired globally.

My Lords, have the Government looked at the implications of AI for the Freedom of Information Act? Someone could quite possibly generate 100,000 questions in about half an hour, which will put pressure on the public sector.

I have not looked at that specific point, but I accept that that is indeed a possibility. The Freedom of Information Act has an enormous number of important roles, but it can be overwhelming. That is another reason why a very small organisation such as ARIA, which is focused on getting its work out while being very transparent about what it is doing, is freed from some of the requirements of that Act, which can place a very large administrative burden on a small organisation.

My Lords, when the Minister is considering whether to apply freedom of information, will he consider the learned comments of the former Prime Minister who introduced it, Mr Blair, who described it as the worst mistake he ever made?

I will not get into whether it was or was not that, but I say again that we have no plans to bring ARIA under the Freedom of Information Act, which I think is important. If we go back to the origins of ARPA—the organisation in the US that led to DARPA, IARPA and many other such organisations on which ARIA is based—its originators in the 1950s and 1960s said that the reason no other country had managed to emulate that successful programme was because they kept everything on too short a leash. We should not make that mistake.

Second Oral Question.

Oh!

I am sorry; I have been told the clocks are not working. There has been a little bit of a mix-up but we will get there.

I have a question for the Minister; I am pretty sure that the answer will be that he has no idea, and that will not be any reflection on him because I do not have any idea either. What has been the total cost to the public purse of the implementation of freedom of information legislation for all the numerous organisations, large and small, across the public sector?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I do not carry that figure in my head. I can tell my noble friend that ARIA has spent 300 hours over the past few months dealing with requests under the Environmental Information Regulations alone, so he can imagine the scale of requests that can come through other things. I am sure the cost of providing information requests to public bodies has been very high.

My Lords, when Ilan Gur recently and sadly announced that he intended to step down as CEO of ARIA, he said that his role was always intended to be time-bound. That being the case, was a succession plan in place to appoint his replacement? Once a new CEO is appointed, will the Government strain every sinew to make sure that a succession plan is in place for their successor?

It has been known for a little while that Ilan Gur would return to the US, where his family is now back. I know, because I was on the board of ARIA for a period before I took up this post, that there were lots of discussions around succession planning. I am sure there will be succession planning in the future as well. What is important—this is why the announcement has been made in this way—is that Ilan is clear that he will stay until the new person is in place.

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?

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.