Dominic Cummings: New £800m Aria scientific agency needs ‘very odd people’ in charge
The UK’s new £800m Aria scientific agency needs “extreme freedom” from Whitehall oversight and should be run by “very odd people”, according to former Number 10 aide Dominic Cummings.
Cummings told a parliamentary committee that the new agency – formally announced by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) last month – that the agency must take on high-risk projects and “wage war on process”.
The former Vote Leave mastermind also said the initial £800m funding for the agency was “fine to begin with”, but that its budget should get to around £3bn to £5bn a year in 10 years’ time.
Aria is based on the US’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which has overseen the creation of experimental military and civilian technologies.
Darpa and its predecessor agency has been responsible for the invention of the internet, GPS and a series of dog-shaped cyborgs.
The creation of a similar agency is a pet project for Cummings, who told Boris Johnson he would only work for him in Downing Street if he promised to fund a UK version of Darpa.
Johnson’s former chief aide said he was “not confident about how it will work out” and that Whitehall would stifle innovation in the agency.
Cummings said at a Science and Technology Committee that Aria should be run by four or five people that have complete control over decision making and have “good taste in scientific ideas and scientific researches”.
He said people like Darpa founder Bob Taylor, along with Leslie Groves and Hermann Joseph Muller, who worked on America’s Manhattan Project that created the first nuclear bomb, are the sort of people needed to run Aria.
“People like General Groves and George muller and Bob Taylor are very, very odd people,” he said.
“I think that is the chief bottleneck in this thing and the most obvious way in which it will fail. If you get some bog standard vice chancellor and put them in it won’t work.
“The basic principle of extreme freedom is completely hostile, completely the opposite of how all normal science funding works and how Whitehall works.”
He said that for the project to be successful that the large majority of projects funded through Aria should fail.
“If it isn’t failing then it’s failing, it has to fail and quite a large percentage of what it does should fail,” he said.
“If that’s not the case then it isn’t taking enough risk and it’s not actually properly sampling from the design space it should be sampling from.
“Venture capitalism which is an easier business…almost all their returns come from a tiny number of successes.”
Cummings was sacked from Number 10 in December, after an internal civil war placed him and former director of communications Lee Cain against Johnson’s partner Carrie Symonds and press secretary Allegra Stratton.
He was widely criticised last year for travelling with his family to Durham last year during the first national lockdown.