UK's Darpa clone faces tough test next spring as government considers future funding

The UK's ambitious efforts to mimic the wild success of US research and security outfit DARPA has just a few months to prove its worth, a parliamentary committee heard yesterday.

The Advanced Research and Invention Agency, or AIRA, was announced in 2021, but was not formally established until January 2023. A product of the Conservative Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit government, the agency is designed to fund transformational research, with a so-called high risk, high reward approach.

However, Lord Drayson, aka Paul Drayson, electric world land speed record holder and member of the Lords Science and Technology Committee pointed out this week that while Aria's initial £800 million ($1 billion) funding would see it through to the end of the 2025/26 financial year, the Labour government is set decide on any future spending next spring, when it announces the multi-year spending review, setting out plans for 2026–27 to at least 2028–29.

Drayson said the Committee was supportive of Aria and wanted it to succeed, but questioned how it would secure its further when the government is set to decide its future well before its Parliamentary review, due in 2033.

Speaking before the Committee, Matt Clifford, ARIA chair, said: "The multi-year spending review will be a really important moment for ARIA. I think we're starting from a position of strength in having broad cross-party support right from inception."

Clifford pointed out that the Labour science minister Patrick Vallance was one of the founding board members of ARIA.

But last month, UK finance minister Rachel Reeves was forced to raise taxes and consider spending cuts in her budget as she struggled to balance the government books, boost the economy, and minimize public debt.

In such a climate, political leaders must weigh up the public's appetite for funding high-risk research with no immediate returns.

Before the Lords' committee, Clifford said: "We recognize that Aria, over the long run, has to provide great value for money, just as any use of public funds needs to, but that that value for money will obviously be measured in a different way, with a different risk appetite, and over a different time frame from the way that many other uses of public funds would. That's why we're so keen to establish core ideas about what failure and success mean for ARIA, what proportion of our programs we expect to succeed, because what we don't want to do is end up in a situation a couple of years where people say, 'When [the] ARIA program failed, does this mean Aria is failing?'"

Ilan Gur, ARIA CEO, told the Lords' committee about projects the organization hoped would bear fruit.

They included a planned biology platform built on the UK's "extremely cutting edge" synthetic biology expertise.

"The power of plants as a technology platform is just unbelievable. What really differentiates that program is its boldness in terms of the target. It aims to create, for the first time, a synthetic organelle [subcellular structure] within a plant system that can be maintained and transferred within species. There is related research, but the community seems to believe this is really out there," he said.

Another project of note is a system that interacts with neural circuits to address neurological disorders. "There is the potential to develop a technology, a single technology insertion point, that could address this broad range of disorders, which, in an integrated way, represent about three times heart disease in terms of the burden," he said.

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Aria is often seen as the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of the Conservative "Vote Leave Brexit" campaign and, later, chief advisor to former prime minister Boris Johnson. Reports suggested his WhatsApp handle once said: "Get Brexit Done, then Arpa (Darpa's predecessor)."

The Lords are not the first to scrutinize Aria's funding pipeline. Even before Aria was launched, Sir John Kingman, former chair of UK Research and Innovation, told Commons Science and Technology Committee, Aria was a good example of departmental research spending that could be cut, sidelined or delayed.

"A very high-profile example would be ARIA, which has been this big plan for the Boris Johnson government, and yet here we are a few years into the Johnson government and it still hasn't even begun to happen," he told MPs in 2021. ®