My Lords, I just repeat a remark I made in Grand Committee in response to the noble Baroness’s speech: I think that she is expressing best practice, certainly as I understand it, on how boards should function. I reconfirm the supportive comment that I made before.

Amendment 17 stands in my name. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington, and the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, for their support. My amendment is intended to address potential abuse; I just put that clearly in people’s minds to start with. It sets out to do so in this way: it specifies that those who have been employed in a department that is either supervising or sponsoring ARIA and have been directly involved as part of the team doing so should not be employed by an entity that has benefited from ARIA funding within five years of leaving the department. It also, in proposed new paragraph 8A(2), applies the same five-year exclusion to persons who have been employed in ARIA itself and who might seek employment in an entity that has benefited from ARIA. Finally, in proposed new paragraph 8A(3), it provides that a person falling under either of the two new paragraphs I mentioned shall not acquire a proprietary interest, either directly or indirectly, in intellectual property or bodies owning intellectual property that have benefited from ARIA for a period of five years.

I will just explain the point. This is all about making sure that decisions are made independently of private interest. The amendment provides that officials in a department supervising ARIA who might make decisions and subsequently gain employment, or those working in ARIA making a funding decision to benefit a body applying for funding from it, need a gap—a cordon sanitaire—before they turn up working for that company or directly investing in it. That is ordinary protection of independent interest. It is important to understand.

I come from the world of scrutiny. Scrutiny has intensified a great deal over the past few years. The ARIA project will be scrutinised many times, not just by the National Audit Office; other scrutineers will feed from its work. That is our normal experience. This will be very closely examined, and if you find people popping up working for downstream companies, it may be viewed within the technology industry very tolerantly, but it will be viewed much less tolerantly in the journalistic or scrutiny community, if I may call it that, so putting strong protection in place now makes a lot of sense. That is what I seek to achieve in my amendment.

Would it be better, rather than having the amendment, to rely on a complex set of regulations that are supposed to govern these matters? Unfortunately, when you look at the record of success in such an approach, the results are extremely patchy and unconvincing. That is because, generally speaking, these codes are applied in quite a light way that understands people’s desire to have employment, rather than the importance of being seen to protect the taxpayer and the public interest.

In my view—this is the purpose of my amendment—it is better to go firmly in the direction of protecting the public interest now and prevent people making decisions that could be alleged to arise from conflict of interest.