Fringe Event at the SNP Party Conference 2021

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 0:00
Thank you to everybody who has joined us on a Monday morning. Thank you for your enthusiasm for joining us today. My name is Talat Yaqoob, I’m a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and I had the opportunity to be part of the Post Covid-19 Futures Commission co chairing the public debate and participation working group. I have the pleasure of introducing a little bit about the report itself, and then introducing the panel. Just to note that we had Cabinet Secretary Humza Yousaf on and I think we’ve just lost him.

He was getting on with another. There we go. That’s great. Thank you very much, Humza. I’ll give you a brief overview of the report. And then I’ll introduce the excellent panel that we have. So at the start of the pandemic, the Royal Society of Edinburgh pulled together people from different areas of public life in Scotland, whether it’s science, academia, business, and beyond. And the purpose of doing so was to identify how can we, at the time we were using language build back better. How can we ensure that Scotland is more resilient and ready for a future crisis? And what can we learn from the one that we are currently still going through, and the position of the RSE was to be as positive as possible, learn what we can and do better next. The aim was to support a better future Scotland to build a fairer more resilient society through addressing immediate challenges and longer term policy and practice questions. It was also an opportunity to learn important lessons about our current processes and institutions are informed by evidence, expertise and public dialogue. Unlike a lot of work that has happened in this area, the Royal Society of Edinburgh tried really hard to engage in new and innovative ways with a wider range of people than simply the those who are asked to be on the working groups. So it explored four key areas and different working groups are set up for this: how to build national resilience, improving public debate and participation and decision making, the use of data evidence and science and delivering inclusive public services. The report was launched not too long ago, October, and some of the key recommendations include forming a national participation strategy and Centre for Scotland to allow more people to be engaged and have power and ownership over the decisions, policies and systems that are developed within Scotland, creating a national foresighting centre to better prepare us for future crises, establishing a fully independent fact checking service to tackle the spread, significant spread of misinformation. Transforming how we deliver public service, particularly around social prescribing, and in community delivery. The entire report is available on thee Royal Society of Edinburgh’s dedicated website on the Post Covid-19 Futures Commission. And we will be asking you questions although I reserve some questions for myself as chair, but please use the chat function and the q&a as we go through this and I try and get as many questions as possible answered, but very briefly introduce our panel. We have Professor Niamh Nic Daéid is director of the award-winning Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science. She was the chair and Commissioner of the Post Covid-19 Futures Commission on data evidence and science. We have Professor Stephen Reicher, Stephen is a member of the SAGE subcommittee advising on behavioural science. He’s a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews and a fellow of the RSE. He was a member of the Post Covid-19 Futures Commission Working Group on data evidence and science. We have Humza Yousaf MSP, appointed Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care in May 2021. I’d like to invite them all to give their kind of introductory remarks on the report and the Cabinet Secretary’s reflections on the report. And I’ll start with Niamh, thank you.

Professor Niamh Nic Daéid FRSE 4:02
Thanks very much Talat. Good morning, everybody, both my fellow panellists, and also everybody who’s joining us online. And I had the real privilege of leading that we’re looking at data evidence and science in its wider context. And really, I suppose the critical things that came out very clearly from how we both went about our business, but also, the information that emerged from the different directions that we had is that without data and good quality data, we can’t generate, to a large extent, evidence and without data and evidence, we can’t really deal with some of the scientific challenges that Covid-19 presented to us. And indeed, we’re in the middle of a new challenge just now. The importance then of looking at what do we mean by data? What were our comfort zones around the delivery are the giving away of our data to both public services and other services. And what’s the responsibility that we’re placing upon them when we give our data freely. And as I said, without that data, that data enables us then to derive evidence, whether it’s from scientific testing, or whether it’s from other means. We had some fantastic conversations, particularly with young adults and young people, and speaking to them really, frankly, about what all of this means for them. And of course, we come, I come with middle aged baggage. So it’s, it’s listening to those young voices, because they’re future generation of our country. That was really, really insightful and really interesting. We equally had some very, I think, powerful conversations with the media and with policymakers where we were speaking again, very frankly, about what what are they seeking when they’re interviewing scientists, or when they’re speaking to scientists, or when they’re speaking to people who are attempting to provide them with data that enables them to either communicate, or to make policy decisions. So to cut it short, that those conversations were really illuminating. They enabled us to pull together the major strands of our recommendations, which was a national conversation about data, evidence and science, which was a fact checking service so that we can separate facts from opinions, and looking at the establishment of curricula for science and schools. And also science communication for those communicators, communication catalysts, the media and policymakers.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 6:42
Thank you so much. Steve, can I come to you?

Professor Stephen Reicher FRSE 6:46
Hello, everyone. As Talat said, I’m a social psychologist at the University of St. Andrews, and became involved in the, in the various advisory groups, both in in the UK and in Scotland around Covid. And it really was a voyage of discovery for me, since I’ve never been involved in such things before. And so the discussions we had within the data evidence group I was I was one of the news worker ants in the group was fascinating and raised, I think, three key issues. The first key issue, I think, for me was that of logistics. So as an academic, normally, if you asked me a question, I say to you, well, I’ll work on a research proposal, I’ll do the research or publish it. And I’ll give you an answer in five years time. And the policymaker looks at you and says, No, next Tuesday. And so just those questions of how do you produce data quickly, that isn’t too dirty, that balance between speed and making sure that things are reliable, because of course, science is never a final word, it always moves on. But you’ve got to give people confidence when you when you make statements that they’re reasonably well backed up to that, that that whole question of logistics, and the different pace of government, and of academia confronted me in a way I’ve never really thought about it before. The second thing is, I mean, I think one of the things that’s been done well in Scotland, and one of the things that’s been understood, is the centrality of trust. The issue of whether people adhere or not, isn’t a question so much of, you know, are they clever? Are they less clever is much more to do with whether they trust the sources of information? So how do we build trust? How do we get people to be willing to take the evidence we say seriously, and also trust our evidence over and above that, which they come across from the anti vaxxers, on social media, and so on. And I think that’s a real challenge to us. Because I think issues like transparency are central to trust, I think issues like, we actually have to begin to think about the nature of our institutions, because if our institutions are seen as exclusive, as places, which ordinary where ordinary people don’t have a place, they’re less likely to trust those who work within them. We’ve got to learn to be better as communicators. And there’s always been a sense within academia. That horribly snobbish sense of there, if you communitcate properly, and popularly, you’re not really an academic, real academics are so clever, and nobody can understand them. So again, I think we’ve got to challenge those views. And the third thing is to get to understand the media, as Niamh was saying some of the most fascinating debates with debates with the media, because for instance, the media has its own values. It loves bad news. And one of the things that I I kept whittling on about when I was in the media was they far prefer somebody, for instance, breaking restrictions, breaking the rules and people doing the dull thing and staying at home and watching the telly. So that leads you to overestimate the number of people who aren’t complying. And if you overestimate the number of people who aren’t complying, you begin to say, Why should I do so myself? So really big questions and really interesting questions, and not something where we’re the great experts, and we can give you the answer. In this as in so much else, it’s got to be a conversation. And we’ve got so much to learn. And I feel I’ve learned a huge amount in this process. And I’m very grateful for those who helped me learn.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 10:39
Thank you so much, even lots to digest there. And I just noticed that we’ve lost it Niamh, thankfully, she’s done her introduction, but that’s the perils of being online and live. But for now, we will move on to Cabinet Secretary Humza Yousaf for your reflections on the report. Thank you.

Humza Yousaf MSP 10:52
Thanks so much, Talat. And look, thanks, first of all, for bringing everybody together. I admire everybody on the call, yourself included, chaired by Professor Reicher and Professor Nic Daéid. And I’ve had some conversations with Professor Reicher, first thing I’ve had the chance to our conversation and be in a panel with Professor Nic Daéid. So although she’s disappeared, I won’t take it as a personal insult, as yet, but I look forward to the discussion that will ensue. And secondly, let me see, I’m pleased that we’ve got a number of people online and watching on what I know will be a busy Monday for everybody. And no doubt, I really, again, taken by what my two previous panel members have said. And I think for me, a few reflections if I may use on your report, but also on some of the broader themes that have been discussed on the report itself. As we produced by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, I think you hit on some of the really key key issues for our preparedness for future crises or pandemics, or those, frankly, events that will cause that really challenge our resilience as a country. But actually, we’d be really daft not to embed some of what you’re suggesting now, for the current pandemic, because I’m afraid this everybody knows. And I suppose the emergence of the new variant of concern confirms we’re nowhere near out of this pandemic, or certainly not over this pandemic in the immediate future. And so, what I’m really keen to capitalise on in terms of what the report has said, and we’ve got a fair bit of work to do within this in government, is the public participation being key to decision making? For me, yeah, again, and I’ve been a government minister for the best part of nine years and 123.. four different roles, now, so different roles. And, you know, they’ve all been incredibly different, actually, in terms of what they’ve involved. The best policy we ever devised, you know, policies, we have devised that those that take the public with us on the journey of what we’re trying to do. And they can understand and see the logic of what we’re trying to do. And we completely fail where we don’t take them. If I just give one example from a previous life, actually, when I was Justice Secretary, you know, depending how you ask the question, you know, actually in Scotland, if you look at Justice, attitudes towards justice, we can seem quite a putative society in once sense, progressive in lots of matters. But actually, in penal policy, we seem to be a little bit more conservative, with a small c, maybe even with a big C at times with justice policy, but then actually, when you when we began to speak to people and do more focus groups and engage with people, we never really test this the National Assembly or national assistance assembly level we should have done actually, when we started to ask people well, do you think people should be given an opportunity to rehabilitate? Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, definitely. Do you think prison is the best place for rehabilitation? No, no, probably not. And so actually, when you began to speak to people about what we were trying to do, you can see that they were coming with you on the journey and it goes as far as justice secretary, you know, just even seeing that change within people who’ve been really harmed by by crime, victims of crime who’ve been really really harmed. Some even who’ve been bereaved by crime. But so I think your focus on public participation being key has been really important for us during the pandemic. I’m not saying we’ve always got it right by any stretch of the imagination, because we felt we’ve had to make decisions that such pace what we haven’t been able to think of it, how do we how do we really incorporate public participation and and that’s that’s the point this Professor Reicher was touching upon and I think it’s a really central point that we’ve got to give some more thought to from from a government perspective. I think leadership is hugely important. I think when you when you when you get it wrong, or you make mistakes, you know, owning up to those is really, really important for public trust. As well, we don’t get everything right. But leadership is hugely important again, although I’m at a party confernece, so I’ll try to get you away from the party politics. But I think that’s probably been one of the major differences between the Scottish Government’s approach and some within the UK Government or some within the UK Government. Without leadership, even we’re asking people to do things, but perhaps not not leading from from the front. And the other point, forgive me to take up too much time. But I was really, again, taken by the report at the points around, no independent fact checking, as well, because for some unbeknownst reasons, people don’t trust politicians. And, you know, even academics have become, you know, really, you know, their their independence really questioned I mean, any academic

that’s probably spoken in the media will have the same day be accused of being a Scottish Government stooge. And at the same time, you know, being accused of, you know, selling out pharma companies or being in the UK government side, and you get accused of multiple things in one appearance. And so how you do that the independent fact checking. Independent where it carries the public confidence is something again, I’m interested in so government, you probably know we have a standing committee setup for a future preparedness for, for a pandemic, that I’ll be frank with you, it’s not as wide yet in scope as it needs to be. It’s got the, you know, got the virologists and the epidemiologists and experts in the Nautics and public psychology and behaviours, but we are missing a huge huge piece on on resilience, actually, and public participation. And I won’t go into the details, because I think I’m already probably over the time that you would, you’d wanted me to speak. But But I do think that that piece of resilience is really really important and John Swinney, the DFM his role is taking some of that work forward. Because although pandemics and future public health crises are focused on public health, understandably so we clearly know from this pandemic, the effects are across society, and therefore making sure each and every single part of our society are able to resist and be resilient to the effects of a future pandemic or indeed a future health crisis, then, then, then we’ve got to do the work. Now. Before that, there’s all what I can say I want because I Okay, and I appreciate you want us to try to keep this sometime so we can take some some questions.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 17:35
Thank you to everyone on the panel, there is a big report and then multiple recommendations. And when you’re talking about crisis that has affected us in so many different ways across different areas of our lives, there’s a lot to digest and a lot to analyse, and therefore many recommendations across the board, I just want to remind those who are watching and listening that you can use the chat function or the q&a to send us any questions. But naturally, as chair, I’ve got a little bit of power that I’m going to use. So I’ve got some questions already here. And what I’d like to ask the panel is how do you think we can build on the momentum to create change that comes about as a consequence of this report and the Commission and the energy of the of building back better, which we had more energy for, there was more conversation about at the beginning of the pandemic, but less of it has come in now. And we see a lot of us returning to normal when normal wasn’t working for a lot of people. So how can we build on the momentum to create change from this report, and what we experienced at the beginning of the pandemic? Stephen, can I come to you first.

Professor Stephen Reicher FRSE 18:47
I always hate it when people asked me to have a crystal ball. And one of the reasons why hated is that the assumption is that things happen of themselves. And actually, things only happen if people work for them. And if people fight for them. And if you say they’re bound to happen, often you demobilise people because they think it’s inevitable. So predictions can have the perverse consequence of making things less likely because they make people more passive. So I don’t want to say what will happen, I want to speak a little bit more about what we need to do and what we need to learn. Because in many ways, I think that the pandemic has been a little bit like a barium meal. It’s revealed things about our society, and some of them are good, but not all of them are good. And I think one of them is that it is revealed with with huge clarity, the nature of inequalities in this society. The fact that you’re more likely to get ill if you’re more exposed, you’re more likely to be exposed if you are less privileged, whether that’s a function of social class, whether it’s a function of ethnicity, whether it’s a function of gender, and so on and so forth. And therefore, I think one of the things I think is absolutely critical is to acknowledge those inequalities, and put those issues of inequality at the very, very centre of what we do. And never forget that and work for that in every single way. That’s the first thing I think we need to put on the agenda. And I think I mean, again, I think that has been recognised. So let me take one inequality, which we often don’t talk about enough. I think that’s generational inequality. In the media, young people have often been demonised. We’ve been told that, you know, young people are out partying, they’re out raving, and they’re the problem, actually, almost the reverse is true. First of all, young people have been hit incredibly hard. And even if they are better off in terms of physical health, in terms of mental health, the statistics on mental health are so disturbing to be almost unbelievable in terms of the proportion of young people who are affected or majority, a majority, over half of our young people are suffering psychologically, the percentage who’ve had suicidal ideation is absolutely massive, we have a huge problem coming down the line. And what’s more, if you look at young people’s behaviour, in many ways, it’s been quite remarkable because if you’re young, the likelihood of getting physical disease from going out, and suffering from it is relatively low. But the cost of staying home are very high, I have a 17 year old, so I’m very well aware of that. So if you thought about yourself, you might think about well, I might as well go out. But young people haven’t done that, because they’ve been thinking communally. They’ve been thinking about their elderly relatives about the community, and they’ve stayed in. So I think young people have done a quite magnificent job. And I think recognising that is really important. So let me give you a contrast from a year ago. And a contrast which you may remember. Because there was a point last autumn where young people and students were being blamed for the rise in infections. And Matt Hancock, and Boris Johnson were talking about, you know, young people are killing their grannies, as if they were choosing to do things that would harm their own families they were blaming. And I still remember the press conference in which the First Minister said look, yes, there are more infections in young people. But there are more infections in the young people precisely because they are more likely to live in multi occupancy flats, they are more likely to work in public facing jobs, like bar jobs, and they’re more likely to be on public transport, they are more likely to be exposed. So if you want to deal with that, then you deal with it by looking at the exposure, not by blaming people and telling people often dividing us. So I think that understanding is there. I think it’s there, not just in terms of generational equality, but in terms of other equalities. But if there is one priority, I think in terms of going forward to build back better, it is acknowledging those issues of inequality and making them absolutely central to all aspects of policy, including health policy.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 23:25
Thank you, Stephen I’m nodding furiously. Cabinet Secretary, can I ask you, how did you think we can build on this report builds on momentum, and go back some of those conversations of building back better which have been well sidelined from the chairs, opinion.

Humza Yousaf MSP 23:44
Yeah, look, thank thanks for that. And I was the same nodding furiously and almost to the point of whiplash with Professor Reicher. But the one he was talking about young people going out raving, but actually the reverse was true. I thought he was going to start a story about Michael Gove, but he didn’t take that opportunity. But look at a few things from from from me that I’ve learned again, I suppose, given my experience in government over over the years. One thing we have to capitalise that we did as policymakers alongside our colleagues and predominantly the public sector, but absolutely in the private sector, too, is that the private sector will often say to us and government, you guys too slow, too slow for innovation for change. And they’re often right, in the public sector, we’re not as quick as we could be. When it comes to innovation. And actually even just rapidly responding to changes in society in the public sector, we can be far, far too slow. And the pandemic forced us to work at a speed that we’ve never worked before often. And we saw some incredible ingenuity out of necessity. And I think just capturing and making sure that, you know, of course, we do our due diligence as you’d expect us to do, and we’re spending taxpayers money. So we’re really important to do that. But perhaps government’s risk appetite needs to be a bit bigger. And remember, again, when the pandemic first hit, I was Justice Secretary, and I’d been talking for a while, since then, well, my role actually as Justice Secretary, I was always in favour of having mobile phones in prisons. I mean, the the evidence was, was unequivocal about how just helpful it was for keeping up family contact, you’re less likely to reoffend if you keep up that family contact provided support to prisoners, for example, you know, if they were struggling with their mental health, in terms of calling, Samaritans, I mean, there were so many, so many advantages from the studies that we’d seen worldwide on that. But of course, you know, pre pandemic it was, you know, going to have to pilot it, that pilots gonna have to be evaluated, we’re gonna have to then take some time over that, you know, etc, etc. But of course, because the pandemic, because a lot of them, we just had to do it. And we did it. That didn’t come without some issues. We noticed in the first instance, that there was an issue in Polmont, where a lot of young people were calling 999, and getting the police to come up to Polmont. And yeah, we’ve just had to deal with these issues. And we were able to, to figure it out. And I suppose just that one example. And there’s loads of examples, think about ingenuity at the beginning of the pandemic, just, you know, one group of, of health workers perhaps don’t get much recognition is our technicians. I mean, they, you know, have transformed every single bit of kit possible into a ventilator that you can imagine at the beginning of this pandemic, if you want to ingenuity, you know, try to see what these guys did with, you know, as I say, every bit of hospital kit that can be could be transformed into a ventilator, they managed to get it turned into a ventilator at the time when we thought that there maybe covid global supply issues. So how do we how do we make sure that we bring that same kind of laser focus and speed of transformative change? As we’re going through the pandemic, but also post pandemic, and then I suppose I’ll say something that that may sound like a complete contradiction to that, which is, we’ve also got to be really upfront with people. And honest with people about the scale of the challenge that we’re facing, I get asked all the time, you know, when when is Mrs. McLaughlin going to get her hip operation, hip replacement. And I’ll get asked questions like that regularly. And, you know, temptation for governments to just pluck off a date of the air and try to get everybody to work towards that. But I think we’ve got to make sure we’re being absolutely honest with people of the scale of the challenge that we’re facing, and how long it does take back to us the phrase that you were using to build back better that Yep, we should absolutely bring some peace to that where we can, without a shadow of a doubt. And the Centre for Sustainable delivery is a good example of that innovation. But it still is going to take a huge bit of time. And then then the last point was just the one that Professor Reicher, really

which which I don’t need to elaborate on at all, but that how do you appeal to that that sense of community, maybe even collective identity, as well, here in Scotland, and those kind of advertising campaigns in Scotland, have that similar thread that run run through it, and I think they’ve been quite effective, which is come on Scotland, let’s pull in the same direction together for the good of the good of the country. And, you know, it’s, it’s, it seems to, as I say, touch or tap into that give me a sense of collective identity, which seems to work. But I don’t say more than that, because Professor Reicher covered in far greater expertise, and that I possibly could, I think, is a really important point to take forward.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 28:50
Thank you, Niamh may I come to you about building momentum from this report.

Professor Niamh Nic Daéid FRSE 28:56
Sure, I would echo my colleagues, I think Steve made some incredibly important points in particular around where we are now in this in the standard sort of sequence of events. And I would echo absolutely the way in which he so eloquently put how our young people have been a just tremendous through this whole pandemic. And also the difference between the way in which our politicians in England and Wales and perhaps our politicians here in Scotland reacted to that were our first minister praised young people for for their both their resilience but also for stepping up and for keeping people safe. I think one of the areas as well and the Cabinet Secretary touched upon it, where we were able to demonstrate Scotland as well as other parts of the United Kingdom and indeed other parts of the world where we could get beyond the boundaries and the barriers that usually stop us and slows down and created in 10 months of vaccine that has transformed our abilities, and to try to get back to some sort of normal life with all of the caveats that that brings. And I was listening, I was very taken. Last Monday, I was listening to the Oxford team who were receiving an award for the work that they had done. And one of the things that Professor Gilbert said, which was really striking was she said, you know, what we’ve shown if we’ve shown nothing else, is that we’ve shown there are different models for doing things, and different ways of getting things done. And we don’t actually have to conform with the constraints that we’ve built for ourselves on how to do things. And similarly, in my own domain, in the criminal justice system, the way in which our judiciary, our prosecutors, defenders, our police forces, our forensic scientists adapted to change really quickly to try to maintain that, that, in the one sense normality, but wasn’t normality, but it enabled the functions of the state to happen. And, again, it’s I think it’s something that, that you might have said, Talat, in the in the introduction, now that we’re beginning to return to normal, but my question will be, Well are we? What is normal? This gives us some huge opportunity to just reshift what that focus of normality is, and again, as I said, in the in the justice system, I don’t see us going backwards now that we’ve embraced the digital world. But what that means is that we need to understand how to build that future. And it comes back to things that we’ve already said, how do we maintain that tremendous momentum that we had at the beginning. And I think in part, the Cabinet Secretary put put his, his his finger on the pulse, and that is about communication, about being ensuring that what we’re saying is, is both accurate and as much as possible, reliable, and to be honest, to own the are honest enough or brave enough, indeed, to own the necessity to sometimes say you know, what, we’re going to need to change what our plans were. And because something else has cropped up, and something else needs to now be fed into the equation of what we’re going to do next in terms of opening up our societies and so on. So gaining that trust, we held that at the beginning, I think without doubt, we are public trust at the beginning of the pandemic, because we all understood what we’re being asked to do. And we understood why we were being asked to do it. And bringing that trust back is is critical, I think, to being able to, to really get the best from the circumstances that we’ve faced, not just in this country, but globally over the last nearly two years now. So we need to ensure that we keep that trust, and if we’ve lost it, we regain it. And I think everybody’s got a voice in that whether we’re politicians, whether we’re scientists, whether whether we whatever part of society we’re working in, to ensure that our communication is clear, but that it’s communication that communicates trust, as well as as as as information.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 33:07
Thank you so much panel. You’ve mentioned this, you touched upon it. And there’s also a question that’s come in specifically about this. But the commission report and highlighted the disproportionate negative impact on marginalised communities. So whether it is disabled people, Black, Asian, minority ethnic communities, women, LGBT communities, working class communities, and the intersections in between have been disproportionately impacted. And it’s not just the commission, multiple reports have evidences of this. How do we engage and ensure that their voices are better heard, so that in decisions are fit for purpose, and it links to what Fiona has asked here, which is if disabled people have been listened to the beginning of the pandemic, and over the last couple of decades, the response to this crisis could have been so wildly different. And she asked that that is part of the report. And also what, what can we do about that in Scotland? Because clearly that conversation isn’t happening. And that conversation is happening, but it’s not being transformed into action and change for those marginalised communities. Niamh, big question. I’ll come to you first.

Professor Niamh Nic Daéid FRSE 34:21
Sorry, just getting my mute to work, it is a big question Fiona and thank you very much for asking it. I think in in terms of probably the domain of of reference that I have that might be best as is both talking about accessibility for marginalised groups, both in theory of justice, but also in the area of higher education. And part of it is what you’ve exactly said, which is we absolutely must engage with the with the people within these groups to understand what the issues are. Often I think that engagement has only ever been in one way, where we’ve we’ve asked people to fill out questionnaires or come to focus groups or, you know, have those discussions with us. And then those of us who have asked for that information go away and don’t ever come back. And so it this business about having a proper conversation, that is an engaged conversation, which means that we engage as much or both sides of that of that debate and feel that they’re being listened to try to understand things from the lived experience of the other person. And because I don’t think we do that particularly well, and enable a conversation to happen in a way that is different than the way it has happened before, so that there isn’t power imbalances, so that there aren’t aspects of those of those groups that are that are speaking with others, that there aren’t aspects where they feel feel that they’re not being heard. So we need to find a mechanism for that to occur. One of the things that we did do during the commission’s work was we looked at different ways on engagement. And we put public engagement through the heart of often the work that we did, where we looked at employing different mechanisms and methodologies. We let we invited people who don’t usually sit in the chair seat to chair things. We got involved with illustrators who created different types of infographics so that people could look at things from different perspectives. And while that was a start, it shows that firstly, we can do it. And secondly, it can be engaging and proved that it can involve this, this two way conversation. But there is such an enormous amount of work to be done here. To try to ensure that these voices that Fiona’s talking about our our heard, I probably have given a very superficial answer, I suspect to that question. But I think it’s one where where we really need to have a concerted really hard think across the leadership of this country to determine how do we pay this more than lip service? And how do we actually listen to the voices that people are asking us to listen to?

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 37:11
Thank you Niamh. Stephen can I come to you?

Oh, Steven, you’re still on mute? I am. I expected that to happen at least once on the panel. That’s fine.

Professor Stephen Reicher FRSE 37:30
Oh, there we go. It’s a different platform. They all have the thingy in different places.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 37:34
Sorry, still on mute, I’m afraid. Oh, can you? I can hear Stephen. Oh, okay.

Professor Stephen Reicher FRSE 37:40
So I was just saying so many platforms, and the buttons are in different places. So I’m very slow in learning. There’s be many bad things about the pandemic, but there have been some pleasures, and one of the pleasures, has been meeting some quite extraordinary people. And another group of people I think we don’t celebrate enough are the civil servants who are doing amazing work behind the scenes. And I’ve become involved in a number of groups. And one of the groups was precisely on trying to develop schemes for community engagement and the civil servants. And I’m sure I’m not meant to name names, but but I will. I apologise if I’m breaking some sort of protocol, but working with with Dorian Grove, on those schemes has been, I mean, I’ve learned a massive amount from it. And the issue of community engagement. It’s an easy soundbite. It’s very difficult to do in practice, because one of the problems, of course, is if you invite the community in, who is the community, and the danger is you get the usual suspects, you get people who’ve got the time, who are articulate, and therefore are the privileged already, and how you make sure you get minorities involved, is really difficult. And there’s brilliant work going on. And I hope to see the fruits of that work in due course, but let’s not underestimate the complexity of doing this. And getting the people who are marginalised to be involved in these processes, is in itself a real challenge. The second thing I want to say is, to me one of the most egregious mistakes that was made early on in the pandemic, at the UK level was when we had to have local measures, and we call them restrictions and we called it lockdown. So in less than if you remember, in the summer of 2020, we started talking about locking things down. Now, lockdown is something that’s punitive. Lockdown is something you do to people who’ve done something wrong. We should have framed things and framed policies much more in terms of support because again, I go back to this point, that the reason why you get large numbers of infections and flare up of infections is because people are exposed and they are exposed because on the whole, they are deprived so how do you support them in every way that you can, because the danger is that we created parts of the country in the UK, more in England, where there were high levels of infection, which were locked down, which were groups of minorities and we pathologize them. Leicester lived under lockdown for over a year and felt deeply disgruntled by the fact that perpetually it was being treated as if they were a problem. So I so I do think and, and the discourse of the whole pandemic, and whenever people talk about COVID measures as a COVID restrictions, I bridle the media do it all the time, they say how will people react to COVID restrictions, actually, we should be talking much more about protections, about support, about giving people the resources, they need to self isolate if they’re ill. And that’s hard to do. If you live in a multi occupancy house, in fact, it’s almost impossible to do, especially if you’ve got vulnerable relatives. So I do think that we have framed the pandemic in the wrong way. And that creates even more problems. And the final point I will make, I’ll use a concrete illustration.

Is around community engagement, if you look at rates of vaccine hesitancy, they are higher amongst groups, which historically have had problematic relations and low trust in government. So the last time I looked at the figures, actually, overall levels of hesitancy, as opposed to people haven’t got round to get vaccinated is a fairly low, it’s about 4%, it was 4% a month or so back. However, it is 12% A month most deprived, it is 14% amongst religious minorities like Muslim groups, it’s 21%, amongst black ethnic minorities. So these are groups with historically low levels of trust. It’s not that people are stupid. It’s not that people are backward in any way. But they have questions, genuine questions, and they have a history of actually medical interventions, which are weren’t always for their own good. There was a big report, joint UK House of Commons and Lords, which showed that over two thirds of black people consider that the NHS takes their concerns less seriously. So the answer to that, for me, is actually to engage with people to show trust, to work through members of the community, to go to the community to make sure that you translate materials. And when you do that work, that careful work, which is about answering general questions, not saying if you don’t get vaccinated, you’re selfish. Or if you don’t get vaccinated, you’re stupid, but understanding that people have real questions and real concerns they want answered, which I doubt many of us can answer if you weren’t experts questions like, what if I have sickle cells disease? How many black people were involved in the trials? What if I’m pregnant, there are answers to those questions, but you need to respect people and listen to them and go through those their communities. And when you do that work, of building trust, rather than waving a stick at people and threatening them with sanctions and telling them they’re fools. If you engage rather than alienate, it does work. It’s it’s not glamorous. It’s meticulous person by person street by street work, but it has to be done. And that has to be the priority.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 43:36
Thank you, Stephen. Humza, Cabinet Secretary, can I come to you next?

Humza Yousaf MSP 43:40
Yeah, thanks again. I really thank both Professor Nic Daéid and Professor Reicher for the comments. So you know, taking notes furiously as they’re speaking, because there’s so much over there for us to make sure we don’t lose sight of. For me, creating the appropriate forum. So social covenants, steering groups, citizens assemblies, all of these worthwhile initiatives. They are extremely helpful policymaking terms of I’ll give you an example of the national care service would probably be the biggest public sector reform, possibly in history of devolution, but for quite a while. At inception stage, we’ve got a social governance Steering Group, which is effectively people lived experience and again, quite a diversity of lived experience from the care, children’s care system, adult care system, social justice, economic justice, social work, etc, etc. They’re coming together to in to really challenge us on that policy at inception stage, and I think it will be of great value to us. But instead of creating these groups, which again, I’m not dismissing the worth the value of them, they are hugely valuable. There’ll be so much better having people of a diverse background. And I mean that in the broadest possible sense, actually making decisions being in the policymakers will be representative of those who are policymakers. So, you know, I from from our from our minority racial perspective, I’m not the only member of government and the history of devolution has ever been non white. And so I’ll bring this out in perspective. I don’t think though I am happy to be challenged on this. I don’t know if we’ve ever had somebody with a permanent disability, for example, or permanent wheelchair user, we can have actually because he will be permanent wheelchair users have been elected has been Pam Duncan-Glancy who got elected in May this year. So you know, we are lacking a real diversity, I think we’re probably more diverse as a government. And I mean, this is government’s, in the devolution era that perhaps UK governments have been previously. But that’s a pretty low bar to judge ourselves by. So I think we, we’ve got to do much more if we want to ensure that the decisions we’re making actually are not just reflective of the challenges that people face in the ground. But actually, when it comes to that building back better as you your reference Talat, that it’s done in a way that is equal, and doesn’t just embed the inequalities that existed in the system previously. And making sure that people that are not just at the table, but are the ones who are making decisions is going to be really important. And then just a reference to Pam Duncan-Glancy, and suppose my SNP conference and the strange to be praising a labour member, but just you know, for the six months that she’s been in Parliament, you can you can see how the parliament and government but certainly the parliament has become far more aware of issues that affect a permanent wheelchair user in a way it just didn’t do. You know, I’ve been a parliamentarian for an elected parliament for 10 years. And it’s don’t, you know, she’s she’s very good in a number of ways. And she’s excellent at articulating the concerns that she has, but actually, you know, justified that she is there an important decision making and a decision making platform such as the Scottish Parliament, that is important. So that’s policymakers. But I think you could see that every senior role that exists in the Scottish society, you touched upon intersectionality. So you know, that that is hugely important. So this is, it’s an issue that frustrates me because I think in Scotland, we’re far too far behind where we should be in all this. So if we want to, weed out those inequalities that exist, and we’ve got to make sure the people that is affecting are I would hope and policymaking decisions, decision positions, if not, then at least creating the structures where they can genuinely influence not as a tick box here, you know, we’ve made the decision, you know, we’ll just go ahead and do a round table with a few people with disabilities and ethnic minorities. And, you know, we’ll just we’ll tick off that box, it’s not the way we’re going to make meaningful change.

And then, and then, really, I suppose the last point is, you know, I really struggle with this. And my own role is just balancing up those various different harms. They are really challenging, because I met with a group of carers, and you know, they were there, they were really rightly so I think they were really hard on government and saying, you know, you have effectively opened up societial, basically mitigation measures in place, etc, etc. But we are really fearful about the effects of, you know, 2000-2500 cases, a day of the virus, and that you pack community transmission, far to higher level, and we feel that we’re being ignored. And so there’s a power of work for us to do, you know, that versus, for example, what Professor Reicher and others have spoken a bit about the mental health impacts of protection measures and and, you know, amongst children, for example, in particular, and how we’re balancing all those things. And of course, we’ll have a public inquiry, and we’ll look at these things. But I think for us, that for decision makers is a really, really difficult challenge and making sure be balanced those various different harms. We’ve tried to see that for harm approach. I’m not saying we’ve always got it right. But it is, again, being upfront about the logic of why we’re doing things and hoping that people understand.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 49:27
Thank you very much the panel, we’re almost coming to the end. But I’ve got one more question. And I’m hoping for a quick round of answers. And it’s an important one, which is none of us have been involved in this Commission to create a report and then then for the report and recommendations to gather dust somewhere. It’s also about implementation and to actually deliver change. But a lot of what we’ve talked about is requires infrastructure. And it requires resourcing within Scotland as well. So a key question I have is, how can we be better prepared for future challenges, how can we also deliver the recommendations? In the in the report? And do we have the infrastructure in place in Scotland to deliver that? If not, what do we need? So first of all, it was the Cabinet Secretary on this one.

Humza Yousaf MSP 50:15
Yeah, thanks. I can be really short on that, which is to say, we’re going to study the report and in great detail, I think so many recommendations are very worthwhile, might not take them up exactly in the in the form, perhaps the report suggests, but I think it’s absolutely the central key points around, you know, independent advice, independent fact checking, public participation, resilience of our infrastructure going forward, these are all points that that I’ve struggled to disagree with and think they’re really worthwhile. I think I think priorities are going to be hugely important for the DFM for us leads a piece of work where government ministers are working together across portfolio, like we always have, but with a focus, I think that he brings, which is exceptionally helpful, because the creation of the infrastructure for the important, it can’t just be seen as the health, the job for the health secretary or the job for public health, to do the pandemic. And this virus continues to affect every section of society, and creating the infrastructure to make sure that we’re building a solid foundation for the future, that is going to be across government, challenge, finance, infrastructure, financing infrastructure, you need to give me another hour to speak to that on which we don’t have, you would be hardly surprised me making this point, particularly an SNP fringe, which is having control over those resources would make my job and our job markedly more easy. But given that we are still within the confines of the United Kingdom, where we have to really work closely with other nations of the UK, but particularly pressure the UK government into making sure the priorities and priorities of recovering from the pandemic are not lost. And that’s a real worry. For me, there’s almost a feeling from some parts of the UK Government that were pretty much to do this. Even if you looked at the latest Spending Review, just over 9 billion over the spending review review period for Covid-19 measures. That doesn’t seem enough, frankly, given how much we’ve already spent. So I will leave it there. But a lot of good food for thought in the report, which I look forward to getting into more detail.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 52:25
Next time, we’ll provide an hour just for how will the government implement all the recommendations noted? I’ll do that next time. Stephen, can I come to you? Do you think we’ve got the infrastructure in Scotland? And how do we move from the report’s recommendations into actual implementation?

Professor Stephen Reicher FRSE 52:41
So one of the things have just been remarkable through a pandemic, I think, is how we have changed into a knowledge based society. I mean, all people in their homes watching the TV are beginning to discuss things about spike proteins and the R rate and so on in a way that you’d never dreamt before. And also in terms of behavioural science, people are thinking in terms of, of trust, social contract adherence, all these issues, the things that used to be, you know, in the tutorial room are now out in society. And I think that’s really valuable. And I think we’ve seen the power of a knowledge based society, and asking what that means in practice, within government as well. I mean, the particular thing that interests me and pleases me is the recognition of the critical role of behavioural science, and the way in which it is critical in the response every bit as critical as the life science. And I think that has real implications for thinking about how that’s organised within government, and between government, the RSE and academia, and everything that is important in the last year or two will be even more important. I’m sorry to be miserable, just before Christmas been in the even bigger crisis before us, which is the climate crisis. So I think we need to learn and learn quickly, because otherwise, we’re in trouble. So, you know, it’s like, the old saying that, you know, if you think his education is, is costly, think about the cost of ignorance. So when it comes to climate crisis, the cost of ignorance will be the destruction of our species. So it’s worth thinking about that. The final point I will make is this. One of the things I like about this commission is not just the Commission, which tells everybody else what they need to do. It tells us what we need to do in the academic world. And I think some of the things we need to implement ourselves as a model to others we can’t ask for money from others unless we do it ourselves is to think about how we make ourselves open, how we make ourselves accessible, how we communicate, whether we put science communication in all our science courses, so let’s show that we can do it and then we’re a better position to ask others to do it.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 54:53
Absolutely, thank you very much Stephen and Niamh can I finally come to you about next step, the infrastructure in Scotland.

Professor Niamh Nic Daéid FRSE 55:00
Thanks, Talat. I’ll be very brief. Steve stole my thunder there because I was going to talk about science communication as it’s, it’s such a critical thing, I think in terms of again, going back and being able to have conversations about the what the science can tell us where we get the data from why we need that data, why it’s so important to have it. And then to use that to generate scientific output and communicated in a way that we can understand it and we can comprehend it ourselves. So that we can rationalise why we need to do certain behaviours. I think I’ve got picked back up on the Cabinet Secretary’s comments about about cross sectoral and cross government challenge. I think he’s entirely correct. This isn’t just one portfolio, this is across the whole of the portfolio’s of government and indeed, of the third sector. But my plea would be, you know, when when some funding, if there is some funding that comes forward is that it’s not funding, that’s the same as we’ve done before. And particularly for the third sector, giving third sector grants that are 12 months long, isn’t going to work, I would suggest, because it’s it’s such a short term, funding pot, that you spend half your time time trying to get the right person to do the job, and then the next half of your time trying to get the next pot of money. And so that type of funding the way in which we fund this, if indeed, the funding comes, and I think needs to be profoundly looked at, so that we can really do something that has a long the traditional difference and creates that long term change and shift in in what we need to do as a society. So So working together on what the next steps are, would involve, of course, government involves higher education involves the third sector, it involves both public and private sectors, I think as well and hello in, in, you know, in in, in reaching a conclusion to that journey towards that where we are now in terms of working out the next steps, but it is something that we all have to work on together echo Steve’s comments about climate change.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 57:11
Excellent. Thank you to all the panel and our extra mini panellist. Welcome. Thank you to everybody. And thank you, for those who have been watching and participating just as a very quick summary, important things that are, you know, unsurprising that I’m taking away, taking this away from it and highlighting it but the importance of centering, tackling inequalities tackling systemic inequalities, and the voices and genuine partnership of marginalised groups within how we make decisions in Scotland and just emphasising Fiona’s point there, one of the audience members who has popped into the chat function of there being parity of esteem in who who has heard, and specifically she was talking here about disabled people, stating what was likely to happen, their experiences, and it not being embedded as part of the decision making. We can’t pay lip service to this. As Steven mentioned, it’s complex. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It requires resourcing time, effort and prioritisation. We talked about building trust. And we do that through honest, accessible public communication. We talked about intergenerational inequality, the importance of collective and community behaviour, not blame and division, but taking people with us on the decisions that we make. And we also talked about the importance of the infrastructure and making this report as something that is not simply gathering dust on a shelf, but is actually implementing change so that we are better resilient, better prepared, and a more equal society when facing future crises and, including the climate crisis that we are experiencing right here. And right now. A huge thank you to the panellists. Thank you to our RSE staff behind the scenes who make this happen. Can I just emphasise again, that there’s a little pinned point at the top of the chat function where you can read the full commission report, send it to others in a few months time, send it to your MSPs maybe give them a reminder that this thing exists and we expect nothing from it. But thank you very much indeed for listening and participating and enjoy the rest of your conference. Thank you. Thanks. Bye. Bye bye.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 0:00
Thank you to everybody who has joined us on a Monday morning. Thank you for your enthusiasm for joining us today. My name is Talat Yaqoob, I’m a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and I had the opportunity to be part of the Post Covid-19 Futures Commission co chairing the public debate and participation working group. I have the pleasure of introducing a little bit about the report itself, and then introducing the panel. Just to note that we had Cabinet Secretary Humza Yousaf on and I think we’ve just lost him.

He was getting on with another. There we go. That’s great. Thank you very much, Humza. I’ll give you a brief overview of the report. And then I’ll introduce the excellent panel that we have. So at the start of the pandemic, the Royal Society of Edinburgh pulled together people from different areas of public life in Scotland, whether it’s science, academia, business, and beyond. And the purpose of doing so was to identify how can we, at the time we were using language build back better. How can we ensure that Scotland is more resilient and ready for a future crisis? And what can we learn from the one that we are currently still going through, and the position of the RSE was to be as positive as possible, learn what we can and do better next. The aim was to support a better future Scotland to build a fairer more resilient society through addressing immediate challenges and longer term policy and practice questions. It was also an opportunity to learn important lessons about our current processes and institutions are informed by evidence, expertise and public dialogue. Unlike a lot of work that has happened in this area, the Royal Society of Edinburgh tried really hard to engage in new and innovative ways with a wider range of people than simply the those who are asked to be on the working groups. So it explored four key areas and different working groups are set up for this: how to build national resilience, improving public debate and participation and decision making, the use of data evidence and science and delivering inclusive public services. The report was launched not too long ago, October, and some of the key recommendations include forming a national participation strategy and Centre for Scotland to allow more people to be engaged and have power and ownership over the decisions, policies and systems that are developed within Scotland, creating a national foresighting centre to better prepare us for future crises, establishing a fully independent fact checking service to tackle the spread, significant spread of misinformation. Transforming how we deliver public service, particularly around social prescribing, and in community delivery. The entire report is available on thee Royal Society of Edinburgh’s dedicated website on the Post Covid-19 Futures Commission. And we will be asking you questions although I reserve some questions for myself as chair, but please use the chat function and the q&a as we go through this and I try and get as many questions as possible answered, but very briefly introduce our panel. We have Professor Niamh Nic Daéid is director of the award-winning Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science. She was the chair and Commissioner of the Post Covid-19 Futures Commission on data evidence and science. We have Professor Stephen Reicher, Stephen is a member of the SAGE subcommittee advising on behavioural science. He’s a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews and a fellow of the RSE. He was a member of the Post Covid-19 Futures Commission Working Group on data evidence and science. We have Humza Yousaf MSP, appointed Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care in May 2021. I’d like to invite them all to give their kind of introductory remarks on the report and the Cabinet Secretary’s reflections on the report. And I’ll start with Niamh, thank you.

Professor Niamh Nic Daéid FRSE 4:02
Thanks very much Talat. Good morning, everybody, both my fellow panellists, and also everybody who’s joining us online. And I had the real privilege of leading that we’re looking at data evidence and science in its wider context. And really, I suppose the critical things that came out very clearly from how we both went about our business, but also, the information that emerged from the different directions that we had is that without data and good quality data, we can’t generate, to a large extent, evidence and without data and evidence, we can’t really deal with some of the scientific challenges that Covid-19 presented to us. And indeed, we’re in the middle of a new challenge just now. The importance then of looking at what do we mean by data? What were our comfort zones around the delivery are the giving away of our data to both public services and other services. And what’s the responsibility that we’re placing upon them when we give our data freely. And as I said, without that data, that data enables us then to derive evidence, whether it’s from scientific testing, or whether it’s from other means. We had some fantastic conversations, particularly with young adults and young people, and speaking to them really, frankly, about what all of this means for them. And of course, we come, I come with middle aged baggage. So it’s, it’s listening to those young voices, because they’re future generation of our country. That was really, really insightful and really interesting. We equally had some very, I think, powerful conversations with the media and with policymakers where we were speaking again, very frankly, about what what are they seeking when they’re interviewing scientists, or when they’re speaking to scientists, or when they’re speaking to people who are attempting to provide them with data that enables them to either communicate, or to make policy decisions. So to cut it short, that those conversations were really illuminating. They enabled us to pull together the major strands of our recommendations, which was a national conversation about data, evidence and science, which was a fact checking service so that we can separate facts from opinions, and looking at the establishment of curricula for science and schools. And also science communication for those communicators, communication catalysts, the media and policymakers.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 6:42
Thank you so much. Steve, can I come to you?

Professor Stephen Reicher FRSE 6:46
Hello, everyone. As Talat said, I’m a social psychologist at the University of St. Andrews, and became involved in the, in the various advisory groups, both in in the UK and in Scotland around Covid. And it really was a voyage of discovery for me, since I’ve never been involved in such things before. And so the discussions we had within the data evidence group I was I was one of the news worker ants in the group was fascinating and raised, I think, three key issues. The first key issue, I think, for me was that of logistics. So as an academic, normally, if you asked me a question, I say to you, well, I’ll work on a research proposal, I’ll do the research or publish it. And I’ll give you an answer in five years time. And the policymaker looks at you and says, No, next Tuesday. And so just those questions of how do you produce data quickly, that isn’t too dirty, that balance between speed and making sure that things are reliable, because of course, science is never a final word, it always moves on. But you’ve got to give people confidence when you when you make statements that they’re reasonably well backed up to that, that that whole question of logistics, and the different pace of government, and of academia confronted me in a way I’ve never really thought about it before. The second thing is, I mean, I think one of the things that’s been done well in Scotland, and one of the things that’s been understood, is the centrality of trust. The issue of whether people adhere or not, isn’t a question so much of, you know, are they clever? Are they less clever is much more to do with whether they trust the sources of information? So how do we build trust? How do we get people to be willing to take the evidence we say seriously, and also trust our evidence over and above that, which they come across from the anti vaxxers, on social media, and so on. And I think that’s a real challenge to us. Because I think issues like transparency are central to trust, I think issues like, we actually have to begin to think about the nature of our institutions, because if our institutions are seen as exclusive, as places, which ordinary where ordinary people don’t have a place, they’re less likely to trust those who work within them. We’ve got to learn to be better as communicators. And there’s always been a sense within academia. That horribly snobbish sense of there, if you communitcate properly, and popularly, you’re not really an academic, real academics are so clever, and nobody can understand them. So again, I think we’ve got to challenge those views. And the third thing is to get to understand the media, as Niamh was saying some of the most fascinating debates with debates with the media, because for instance, the media has its own values. It loves bad news. And one of the things that I I kept whittling on about when I was in the media was they far prefer somebody, for instance, breaking restrictions, breaking the rules and people doing the dull thing and staying at home and watching the telly. So that leads you to overestimate the number of people who aren’t complying. And if you overestimate the number of people who aren’t complying, you begin to say, Why should I do so myself? So really big questions and really interesting questions, and not something where we’re the great experts, and we can give you the answer. In this as in so much else, it’s got to be a conversation. And we’ve got so much to learn. And I feel I’ve learned a huge amount in this process. And I’m very grateful for those who helped me learn.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 10:39
Thank you so much, even lots to digest there. And I just noticed that we’ve lost it Niamh, thankfully, she’s done her introduction, but that’s the perils of being online and live. But for now, we will move on to Cabinet Secretary Humza Yousaf for your reflections on the report. Thank you.

Humza Yousaf MSP 10:52
Thanks so much, Talat. And look, thanks, first of all, for bringing everybody together. I admire everybody on the call, yourself included, chaired by Professor Reicher and Professor Nic Daéid. And I’ve had some conversations with Professor Reicher, first thing I’ve had the chance to our conversation and be in a panel with Professor Nic Daéid. So although she’s disappeared, I won’t take it as a personal insult, as yet, but I look forward to the discussion that will ensue. And secondly, let me see, I’m pleased that we’ve got a number of people online and watching on what I know will be a busy Monday for everybody. And no doubt, I really, again, taken by what my two previous panel members have said. And I think for me, a few reflections if I may use on your report, but also on some of the broader themes that have been discussed on the report itself. As we produced by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, I think you hit on some of the really key key issues for our preparedness for future crises or pandemics, or those, frankly, events that will cause that really challenge our resilience as a country. But actually, we’d be really daft not to embed some of what you’re suggesting now, for the current pandemic, because I’m afraid this everybody knows. And I suppose the emergence of the new variant of concern confirms we’re nowhere near out of this pandemic, or certainly not over this pandemic in the immediate future. And so, what I’m really keen to capitalise on in terms of what the report has said, and we’ve got a fair bit of work to do within this in government, is the public participation being key to decision making? For me, yeah, again, and I’ve been a government minister for the best part of nine years and 123.. four different roles, now, so different roles. And, you know, they’ve all been incredibly different, actually, in terms of what they’ve involved. The best policy we ever devised, you know, policies, we have devised that those that take the public with us on the journey of what we’re trying to do. And they can understand and see the logic of what we’re trying to do. And we completely fail where we don’t take them. If I just give one example from a previous life, actually, when I was Justice Secretary, you know, depending how you ask the question, you know, actually in Scotland, if you look at Justice, attitudes towards justice, we can seem quite a putative society in once sense, progressive in lots of matters. But actually, in penal policy, we seem to be a little bit more conservative, with a small c, maybe even with a big C at times with justice policy, but then actually, when you when we began to speak to people and do more focus groups and engage with people, we never really test this the National Assembly or national assistance assembly level we should have done actually, when we started to ask people well, do you think people should be given an opportunity to rehabilitate? Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, definitely. Do you think prison is the best place for rehabilitation? No, no, probably not. And so actually, when you began to speak to people about what we were trying to do, you can see that they were coming with you on the journey and it goes as far as justice secretary, you know, just even seeing that change within people who’ve been really harmed by by crime, victims of crime who’ve been really really harmed. Some even who’ve been bereaved by crime. But so I think your focus on public participation being key has been really important for us during the pandemic. I’m not saying we’ve always got it right by any stretch of the imagination, because we felt we’ve had to make decisions that such pace what we haven’t been able to think of it, how do we how do we really incorporate public participation and and that’s that’s the point this Professor Reicher was touching upon and I think it’s a really central point that we’ve got to give some more thought to from from a government perspective. I think leadership is hugely important. I think when you when you when you get it wrong, or you make mistakes, you know, owning up to those is really, really important for public trust. As well, we don’t get everything right. But leadership is hugely important again, although I’m at a party confernece, so I’ll try to get you away from the party politics. But I think that’s probably been one of the major differences between the Scottish Government’s approach and some within the UK Government or some within the UK Government. Without leadership, even we’re asking people to do things, but perhaps not not leading from from the front. And the other point, forgive me to take up too much time. But I was really, again, taken by the report at the points around, no independent fact checking, as well, because for some unbeknownst reasons, people don’t trust politicians. And, you know, even academics have become, you know, really, you know, their their independence really questioned I mean, any academic

that’s probably spoken in the media will have the same day be accused of being a Scottish Government stooge. And at the same time, you know, being accused of, you know, selling out pharma companies or being in the UK government side, and you get accused of multiple things in one appearance. And so how you do that the independent fact checking. Independent where it carries the public confidence is something again, I’m interested in so government, you probably know we have a standing committee setup for a future preparedness for, for a pandemic, that I’ll be frank with you, it’s not as wide yet in scope as it needs to be. It’s got the, you know, got the virologists and the epidemiologists and experts in the Nautics and public psychology and behaviours, but we are missing a huge huge piece on on resilience, actually, and public participation. And I won’t go into the details, because I think I’m already probably over the time that you would, you’d wanted me to speak. But But I do think that that piece of resilience is really really important and John Swinney, the DFM his role is taking some of that work forward. Because although pandemics and future public health crises are focused on public health, understandably so we clearly know from this pandemic, the effects are across society, and therefore making sure each and every single part of our society are able to resist and be resilient to the effects of a future pandemic or indeed a future health crisis, then, then, then we’ve got to do the work. Now. Before that, there’s all what I can say I want because I Okay, and I appreciate you want us to try to keep this sometime so we can take some some questions.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 17:35
Thank you to everyone on the panel, there is a big report and then multiple recommendations. And when you’re talking about crisis that has affected us in so many different ways across different areas of our lives, there’s a lot to digest and a lot to analyse, and therefore many recommendations across the board, I just want to remind those who are watching and listening that you can use the chat function or the q&a to send us any questions. But naturally, as chair, I’ve got a little bit of power that I’m going to use. So I’ve got some questions already here. And what I’d like to ask the panel is how do you think we can build on the momentum to create change that comes about as a consequence of this report and the Commission and the energy of the of building back better, which we had more energy for, there was more conversation about at the beginning of the pandemic, but less of it has come in now. And we see a lot of us returning to normal when normal wasn’t working for a lot of people. So how can we build on the momentum to create change from this report, and what we experienced at the beginning of the pandemic? Stephen, can I come to you first.

Professor Stephen Reicher FRSE 18:47
I always hate it when people asked me to have a crystal ball. And one of the reasons why hated is that the assumption is that things happen of themselves. And actually, things only happen if people work for them. And if people fight for them. And if you say they’re bound to happen, often you demobilise people because they think it’s inevitable. So predictions can have the perverse consequence of making things less likely because they make people more passive. So I don’t want to say what will happen, I want to speak a little bit more about what we need to do and what we need to learn. Because in many ways, I think that the pandemic has been a little bit like a barium meal. It’s revealed things about our society, and some of them are good, but not all of them are good. And I think one of them is that it is revealed with with huge clarity, the nature of inequalities in this society. The fact that you’re more likely to get ill if you’re more exposed, you’re more likely to be exposed if you are less privileged, whether that’s a function of social class, whether it’s a function of ethnicity, whether it’s a function of gender, and so on and so forth. And therefore, I think one of the things I think is absolutely critical is to acknowledge those inequalities, and put those issues of inequality at the very, very centre of what we do. And never forget that and work for that in every single way. That’s the first thing I think we need to put on the agenda. And I think I mean, again, I think that has been recognised. So let me take one inequality, which we often don’t talk about enough. I think that’s generational inequality. In the media, young people have often been demonised. We’ve been told that, you know, young people are out partying, they’re out raving, and they’re the problem, actually, almost the reverse is true. First of all, young people have been hit incredibly hard. And even if they are better off in terms of physical health, in terms of mental health, the statistics on mental health are so disturbing to be almost unbelievable in terms of the proportion of young people who are affected or majority, a majority, over half of our young people are suffering psychologically, the percentage who’ve had suicidal ideation is absolutely massive, we have a huge problem coming down the line. And what’s more, if you look at young people’s behaviour, in many ways, it’s been quite remarkable because if you’re young, the likelihood of getting physical disease from going out, and suffering from it is relatively low. But the cost of staying home are very high, I have a 17 year old, so I’m very well aware of that. So if you thought about yourself, you might think about well, I might as well go out. But young people haven’t done that, because they’ve been thinking communally. They’ve been thinking about their elderly relatives about the community, and they’ve stayed in. So I think young people have done a quite magnificent job. And I think recognising that is really important. So let me give you a contrast from a year ago. And a contrast which you may remember. Because there was a point last autumn where young people and students were being blamed for the rise in infections. And Matt Hancock, and Boris Johnson were talking about, you know, young people are killing their grannies, as if they were choosing to do things that would harm their own families they were blaming. And I still remember the press conference in which the First Minister said look, yes, there are more infections in young people. But there are more infections in the young people precisely because they are more likely to live in multi occupancy flats, they are more likely to work in public facing jobs, like bar jobs, and they’re more likely to be on public transport, they are more likely to be exposed. So if you want to deal with that, then you deal with it by looking at the exposure, not by blaming people and telling people often dividing us. So I think that understanding is there. I think it’s there, not just in terms of generational equality, but in terms of other equalities. But if there is one priority, I think in terms of going forward to build back better, it is acknowledging those issues of inequality and making them absolutely central to all aspects of policy, including health policy.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 23:25
Thank you, Stephen I’m nodding furiously. Cabinet Secretary, can I ask you, how did you think we can build on this report builds on momentum, and go back some of those conversations of building back better which have been well sidelined from the chairs, opinion.

Humza Yousaf MSP 23:44
Yeah, look, thank thanks for that. And I was the same nodding furiously and almost to the point of whiplash with Professor Reicher. But the one he was talking about young people going out raving, but actually the reverse was true. I thought he was going to start a story about Michael Gove, but he didn’t take that opportunity. But look at a few things from from from me that I’ve learned again, I suppose, given my experience in government over over the years. One thing we have to capitalise that we did as policymakers alongside our colleagues and predominantly the public sector, but absolutely in the private sector, too, is that the private sector will often say to us and government, you guys too slow, too slow for innovation for change. And they’re often right, in the public sector, we’re not as quick as we could be. When it comes to innovation. And actually even just rapidly responding to changes in society in the public sector, we can be far, far too slow. And the pandemic forced us to work at a speed that we’ve never worked before often. And we saw some incredible ingenuity out of necessity. And I think just capturing and making sure that, you know, of course, we do our due diligence as you’d expect us to do, and we’re spending taxpayers money. So we’re really important to do that. But perhaps government’s risk appetite needs to be a bit bigger. And remember, again, when the pandemic first hit, I was Justice Secretary, and I’d been talking for a while, since then, well, my role actually as Justice Secretary, I was always in favour of having mobile phones in prisons. I mean, the the evidence was, was unequivocal about how just helpful it was for keeping up family contact, you’re less likely to reoffend if you keep up that family contact provided support to prisoners, for example, you know, if they were struggling with their mental health, in terms of calling, Samaritans, I mean, there were so many, so many advantages from the studies that we’d seen worldwide on that. But of course, you know, pre pandemic it was, you know, going to have to pilot it, that pilots gonna have to be evaluated, we’re gonna have to then take some time over that, you know, etc, etc. But of course, because the pandemic, because a lot of them, we just had to do it. And we did it. That didn’t come without some issues. We noticed in the first instance, that there was an issue in Polmont, where a lot of young people were calling 999, and getting the police to come up to Polmont. And yeah, we’ve just had to deal with these issues. And we were able to, to figure it out. And I suppose just that one example. And there’s loads of examples, think about ingenuity at the beginning of the pandemic, just, you know, one group of, of health workers perhaps don’t get much recognition is our technicians. I mean, they, you know, have transformed every single bit of kit possible into a ventilator that you can imagine at the beginning of this pandemic, if you want to ingenuity, you know, try to see what these guys did with, you know, as I say, every bit of hospital kit that can be could be transformed into a ventilator, they managed to get it turned into a ventilator at the time when we thought that there maybe covid global supply issues. So how do we how do we make sure that we bring that same kind of laser focus and speed of transformative change? As we’re going through the pandemic, but also post pandemic, and then I suppose I’ll say something that that may sound like a complete contradiction to that, which is, we’ve also got to be really upfront with people. And honest with people about the scale of the challenge that we’re facing, I get asked all the time, you know, when when is Mrs. McLaughlin going to get her hip operation, hip replacement. And I’ll get asked questions like that regularly. And, you know, temptation for governments to just pluck off a date of the air and try to get everybody to work towards that. But I think we’ve got to make sure we’re being absolutely honest with people of the scale of the challenge that we’re facing, and how long it does take back to us the phrase that you were using to build back better that Yep, we should absolutely bring some peace to that where we can, without a shadow of a doubt. And the Centre for Sustainable delivery is a good example of that innovation. But it still is going to take a huge bit of time. And then then the last point was just the one that Professor Reicher, really

which which I don’t need to elaborate on at all, but that how do you appeal to that that sense of community, maybe even collective identity, as well, here in Scotland, and those kind of advertising campaigns in Scotland, have that similar thread that run run through it, and I think they’ve been quite effective, which is come on Scotland, let’s pull in the same direction together for the good of the good of the country. And, you know, it’s, it’s, it seems to, as I say, touch or tap into that give me a sense of collective identity, which seems to work. But I don’t say more than that, because Professor Reicher covered in far greater expertise, and that I possibly could, I think, is a really important point to take forward.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 28:50
Thank you, Niamh may I come to you about building momentum from this report.

Professor Niamh Nic Daéid FRSE 28:56
Sure, I would echo my colleagues, I think Steve made some incredibly important points in particular around where we are now in this in the standard sort of sequence of events. And I would echo absolutely the way in which he so eloquently put how our young people have been a just tremendous through this whole pandemic. And also the difference between the way in which our politicians in England and Wales and perhaps our politicians here in Scotland reacted to that were our first minister praised young people for for their both their resilience but also for stepping up and for keeping people safe. I think one of the areas as well and the Cabinet Secretary touched upon it, where we were able to demonstrate Scotland as well as other parts of the United Kingdom and indeed other parts of the world where we could get beyond the boundaries and the barriers that usually stop us and slows down and created in 10 months of vaccine that has transformed our abilities, and to try to get back to some sort of normal life with all of the caveats that that brings. And I was listening, I was very taken. Last Monday, I was listening to the Oxford team who were receiving an award for the work that they had done. And one of the things that Professor Gilbert said, which was really striking was she said, you know, what we’ve shown if we’ve shown nothing else, is that we’ve shown there are different models for doing things, and different ways of getting things done. And we don’t actually have to conform with the constraints that we’ve built for ourselves on how to do things. And similarly, in my own domain, in the criminal justice system, the way in which our judiciary, our prosecutors, defenders, our police forces, our forensic scientists adapted to change really quickly to try to maintain that, that, in the one sense normality, but wasn’t normality, but it enabled the functions of the state to happen. And, again, it’s I think it’s something that, that you might have said, Talat, in the in the introduction, now that we’re beginning to return to normal, but my question will be, Well are we? What is normal? This gives us some huge opportunity to just reshift what that focus of normality is, and again, as I said, in the in the justice system, I don’t see us going backwards now that we’ve embraced the digital world. But what that means is that we need to understand how to build that future. And it comes back to things that we’ve already said, how do we maintain that tremendous momentum that we had at the beginning. And I think in part, the Cabinet Secretary put put his, his his finger on the pulse, and that is about communication, about being ensuring that what we’re saying is, is both accurate and as much as possible, reliable, and to be honest, to own the are honest enough or brave enough, indeed, to own the necessity to sometimes say you know, what, we’re going to need to change what our plans were. And because something else has cropped up, and something else needs to now be fed into the equation of what we’re going to do next in terms of opening up our societies and so on. So gaining that trust, we held that at the beginning, I think without doubt, we are public trust at the beginning of the pandemic, because we all understood what we’re being asked to do. And we understood why we were being asked to do it. And bringing that trust back is is critical, I think, to being able to, to really get the best from the circumstances that we’ve faced, not just in this country, but globally over the last nearly two years now. So we need to ensure that we keep that trust, and if we’ve lost it, we regain it. And I think everybody’s got a voice in that whether we’re politicians, whether we’re scientists, whether whether we whatever part of society we’re working in, to ensure that our communication is clear, but that it’s communication that communicates trust, as well as as as as information.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 33:07
Thank you so much panel. You’ve mentioned this, you touched upon it. And there’s also a question that’s come in specifically about this. But the commission report and highlighted the disproportionate negative impact on marginalised communities. So whether it is disabled people, Black, Asian, minority ethnic communities, women, LGBT communities, working class communities, and the intersections in between have been disproportionately impacted. And it’s not just the commission, multiple reports have evidences of this. How do we engage and ensure that their voices are better heard, so that in decisions are fit for purpose, and it links to what Fiona has asked here, which is if disabled people have been listened to the beginning of the pandemic, and over the last couple of decades, the response to this crisis could have been so wildly different. And she asked that that is part of the report. And also what, what can we do about that in Scotland? Because clearly that conversation isn’t happening. And that conversation is happening, but it’s not being transformed into action and change for those marginalised communities. Niamh, big question. I’ll come to you first.

Professor Niamh Nic Daéid FRSE 34:21
Sorry, just getting my mute to work, it is a big question Fiona and thank you very much for asking it. I think in in terms of probably the domain of of reference that I have that might be best as is both talking about accessibility for marginalised groups, both in theory of justice, but also in the area of higher education. And part of it is what you’ve exactly said, which is we absolutely must engage with the with the people within these groups to understand what the issues are. Often I think that engagement has only ever been in one way, where we’ve we’ve asked people to fill out questionnaires or come to focus groups or, you know, have those discussions with us. And then those of us who have asked for that information go away and don’t ever come back. And so it this business about having a proper conversation, that is an engaged conversation, which means that we engage as much or both sides of that of that debate and feel that they’re being listened to try to understand things from the lived experience of the other person. And because I don’t think we do that particularly well, and enable a conversation to happen in a way that is different than the way it has happened before, so that there isn’t power imbalances, so that there aren’t aspects of those of those groups that are that are speaking with others, that there aren’t aspects where they feel feel that they’re not being heard. So we need to find a mechanism for that to occur. One of the things that we did do during the commission’s work was we looked at different ways on engagement. And we put public engagement through the heart of often the work that we did, where we looked at employing different mechanisms and methodologies. We let we invited people who don’t usually sit in the chair seat to chair things. We got involved with illustrators who created different types of infographics so that people could look at things from different perspectives. And while that was a start, it shows that firstly, we can do it. And secondly, it can be engaging and proved that it can involve this, this two way conversation. But there is such an enormous amount of work to be done here. To try to ensure that these voices that Fiona’s talking about our our heard, I probably have given a very superficial answer, I suspect to that question. But I think it’s one where where we really need to have a concerted really hard think across the leadership of this country to determine how do we pay this more than lip service? And how do we actually listen to the voices that people are asking us to listen to?

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 37:11
Thank you Niamh. Stephen can I come to you?

Oh, Steven, you’re still on mute? I am. I expected that to happen at least once on the panel. That’s fine.

Professor Stephen Reicher FRSE 37:30
Oh, there we go. It’s a different platform. They all have the thingy in different places.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 37:34
Sorry, still on mute, I’m afraid. Oh, can you? I can hear Stephen. Oh, okay.

Professor Stephen Reicher FRSE 37:40
So I was just saying so many platforms, and the buttons are in different places. So I’m very slow in learning. There’s be many bad things about the pandemic, but there have been some pleasures, and one of the pleasures, has been meeting some quite extraordinary people. And another group of people I think we don’t celebrate enough are the civil servants who are doing amazing work behind the scenes. And I’ve become involved in a number of groups. And one of the groups was precisely on trying to develop schemes for community engagement and the civil servants. And I’m sure I’m not meant to name names, but but I will. I apologise if I’m breaking some sort of protocol, but working with with Dorian Grove, on those schemes has been, I mean, I’ve learned a massive amount from it. And the issue of community engagement. It’s an easy soundbite. It’s very difficult to do in practice, because one of the problems, of course, is if you invite the community in, who is the community, and the danger is you get the usual suspects, you get people who’ve got the time, who are articulate, and therefore are the privileged already, and how you make sure you get minorities involved, is really difficult. And there’s brilliant work going on. And I hope to see the fruits of that work in due course, but let’s not underestimate the complexity of doing this. And getting the people who are marginalised to be involved in these processes, is in itself a real challenge. The second thing I want to say is, to me one of the most egregious mistakes that was made early on in the pandemic, at the UK level was when we had to have local measures, and we call them restrictions and we called it lockdown. So in less than if you remember, in the summer of 2020, we started talking about locking things down. Now, lockdown is something that’s punitive. Lockdown is something you do to people who’ve done something wrong. We should have framed things and framed policies much more in terms of support because again, I go back to this point, that the reason why you get large numbers of infections and flare up of infections is because people are exposed and they are exposed because on the whole, they are deprived so how do you support them in every way that you can, because the danger is that we created parts of the country in the UK, more in England, where there were high levels of infection, which were locked down, which were groups of minorities and we pathologize them. Leicester lived under lockdown for over a year and felt deeply disgruntled by the fact that perpetually it was being treated as if they were a problem. So I so I do think and, and the discourse of the whole pandemic, and whenever people talk about COVID measures as a COVID restrictions, I bridle the media do it all the time, they say how will people react to COVID restrictions, actually, we should be talking much more about protections, about support, about giving people the resources, they need to self isolate if they’re ill. And that’s hard to do. If you live in a multi occupancy house, in fact, it’s almost impossible to do, especially if you’ve got vulnerable relatives. So I do think that we have framed the pandemic in the wrong way. And that creates even more problems. And the final point I will make, I’ll use a concrete illustration.

Is around community engagement, if you look at rates of vaccine hesitancy, they are higher amongst groups, which historically have had problematic relations and low trust in government. So the last time I looked at the figures, actually, overall levels of hesitancy, as opposed to people haven’t got round to get vaccinated is a fairly low, it’s about 4%, it was 4% a month or so back. However, it is 12% A month most deprived, it is 14% amongst religious minorities like Muslim groups, it’s 21%, amongst black ethnic minorities. So these are groups with historically low levels of trust. It’s not that people are stupid. It’s not that people are backward in any way. But they have questions, genuine questions, and they have a history of actually medical interventions, which are weren’t always for their own good. There was a big report, joint UK House of Commons and Lords, which showed that over two thirds of black people consider that the NHS takes their concerns less seriously. So the answer to that, for me, is actually to engage with people to show trust, to work through members of the community, to go to the community to make sure that you translate materials. And when you do that work, that careful work, which is about answering general questions, not saying if you don’t get vaccinated, you’re selfish. Or if you don’t get vaccinated, you’re stupid, but understanding that people have real questions and real concerns they want answered, which I doubt many of us can answer if you weren’t experts questions like, what if I have sickle cells disease? How many black people were involved in the trials? What if I’m pregnant, there are answers to those questions, but you need to respect people and listen to them and go through those their communities. And when you do that work, of building trust, rather than waving a stick at people and threatening them with sanctions and telling them they’re fools. If you engage rather than alienate, it does work. It’s it’s not glamorous. It’s meticulous person by person street by street work, but it has to be done. And that has to be the priority.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 43:36
Thank you, Stephen. Humza, Cabinet Secretary, can I come to you next?

Humza Yousaf MSP 43:40
Yeah, thanks again. I really thank both Professor Nic Daéid and Professor Reicher for the comments. So you know, taking notes furiously as they’re speaking, because there’s so much over there for us to make sure we don’t lose sight of. For me, creating the appropriate forum. So social covenants, steering groups, citizens assemblies, all of these worthwhile initiatives. They are extremely helpful policymaking terms of I’ll give you an example of the national care service would probably be the biggest public sector reform, possibly in history of devolution, but for quite a while. At inception stage, we’ve got a social governance Steering Group, which is effectively people lived experience and again, quite a diversity of lived experience from the care, children’s care system, adult care system, social justice, economic justice, social work, etc, etc. They’re coming together to in to really challenge us on that policy at inception stage, and I think it will be of great value to us. But instead of creating these groups, which again, I’m not dismissing the worth the value of them, they are hugely valuable. There’ll be so much better having people of a diverse background. And I mean that in the broadest possible sense, actually making decisions being in the policymakers will be representative of those who are policymakers. So, you know, I from from our from our minority racial perspective, I’m not the only member of government and the history of devolution has ever been non white. And so I’ll bring this out in perspective. I don’t think though I am happy to be challenged on this. I don’t know if we’ve ever had somebody with a permanent disability, for example, or permanent wheelchair user, we can have actually because he will be permanent wheelchair users have been elected has been Pam Duncan-Glancy who got elected in May this year. So you know, we are lacking a real diversity, I think we’re probably more diverse as a government. And I mean, this is government’s, in the devolution era that perhaps UK governments have been previously. But that’s a pretty low bar to judge ourselves by. So I think we, we’ve got to do much more if we want to ensure that the decisions we’re making actually are not just reflective of the challenges that people face in the ground. But actually, when it comes to that building back better as you your reference Talat, that it’s done in a way that is equal, and doesn’t just embed the inequalities that existed in the system previously. And making sure that people that are not just at the table, but are the ones who are making decisions is going to be really important. And then just a reference to Pam Duncan-Glancy, and suppose my SNP conference and the strange to be praising a labour member, but just you know, for the six months that she’s been in Parliament, you can you can see how the parliament and government but certainly the parliament has become far more aware of issues that affect a permanent wheelchair user in a way it just didn’t do. You know, I’ve been a parliamentarian for an elected parliament for 10 years. And it’s don’t, you know, she’s she’s very good in a number of ways. And she’s excellent at articulating the concerns that she has, but actually, you know, justified that she is there an important decision making and a decision making platform such as the Scottish Parliament, that is important. So that’s policymakers. But I think you could see that every senior role that exists in the Scottish society, you touched upon intersectionality. So you know, that that is hugely important. So this is, it’s an issue that frustrates me because I think in Scotland, we’re far too far behind where we should be in all this. So if we want to, weed out those inequalities that exist, and we’ve got to make sure the people that is affecting are I would hope and policymaking decisions, decision positions, if not, then at least creating the structures where they can genuinely influence not as a tick box here, you know, we’ve made the decision, you know, we’ll just go ahead and do a round table with a few people with disabilities and ethnic minorities. And, you know, we’ll just we’ll tick off that box, it’s not the way we’re going to make meaningful change.

And then, and then, really, I suppose the last point is, you know, I really struggle with this. And my own role is just balancing up those various different harms. They are really challenging, because I met with a group of carers, and you know, they were there, they were really rightly so I think they were really hard on government and saying, you know, you have effectively opened up societial, basically mitigation measures in place, etc, etc. But we are really fearful about the effects of, you know, 2000-2500 cases, a day of the virus, and that you pack community transmission, far to higher level, and we feel that we’re being ignored. And so there’s a power of work for us to do, you know, that versus, for example, what Professor Reicher and others have spoken a bit about the mental health impacts of protection measures and and, you know, amongst children, for example, in particular, and how we’re balancing all those things. And of course, we’ll have a public inquiry, and we’ll look at these things. But I think for us, that for decision makers is a really, really difficult challenge and making sure be balanced those various different harms. We’ve tried to see that for harm approach. I’m not saying we’ve always got it right. But it is, again, being upfront about the logic of why we’re doing things and hoping that people understand.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 49:27
Thank you very much the panel, we’re almost coming to the end. But I’ve got one more question. And I’m hoping for a quick round of answers. And it’s an important one, which is none of us have been involved in this Commission to create a report and then then for the report and recommendations to gather dust somewhere. It’s also about implementation and to actually deliver change. But a lot of what we’ve talked about is requires infrastructure. And it requires resourcing within Scotland as well. So a key question I have is, how can we be better prepared for future challenges, how can we also deliver the recommendations? In the in the report? And do we have the infrastructure in place in Scotland to deliver that? If not, what do we need? So first of all, it was the Cabinet Secretary on this one.

Humza Yousaf MSP 50:15
Yeah, thanks. I can be really short on that, which is to say, we’re going to study the report and in great detail, I think so many recommendations are very worthwhile, might not take them up exactly in the in the form, perhaps the report suggests, but I think it’s absolutely the central key points around, you know, independent advice, independent fact checking, public participation, resilience of our infrastructure going forward, these are all points that that I’ve struggled to disagree with and think they’re really worthwhile. I think I think priorities are going to be hugely important for the DFM for us leads a piece of work where government ministers are working together across portfolio, like we always have, but with a focus, I think that he brings, which is exceptionally helpful, because the creation of the infrastructure for the important, it can’t just be seen as the health, the job for the health secretary or the job for public health, to do the pandemic. And this virus continues to affect every section of society, and creating the infrastructure to make sure that we’re building a solid foundation for the future, that is going to be across government, challenge, finance, infrastructure, financing infrastructure, you need to give me another hour to speak to that on which we don’t have, you would be hardly surprised me making this point, particularly an SNP fringe, which is having control over those resources would make my job and our job markedly more easy. But given that we are still within the confines of the United Kingdom, where we have to really work closely with other nations of the UK, but particularly pressure the UK government into making sure the priorities and priorities of recovering from the pandemic are not lost. And that’s a real worry. For me, there’s almost a feeling from some parts of the UK Government that were pretty much to do this. Even if you looked at the latest Spending Review, just over 9 billion over the spending review review period for Covid-19 measures. That doesn’t seem enough, frankly, given how much we’ve already spent. So I will leave it there. But a lot of good food for thought in the report, which I look forward to getting into more detail.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 52:25
Next time, we’ll provide an hour just for how will the government implement all the recommendations noted? I’ll do that next time. Stephen, can I come to you? Do you think we’ve got the infrastructure in Scotland? And how do we move from the report’s recommendations into actual implementation?

Professor Stephen Reicher FRSE 52:41
So one of the things have just been remarkable through a pandemic, I think, is how we have changed into a knowledge based society. I mean, all people in their homes watching the TV are beginning to discuss things about spike proteins and the R rate and so on in a way that you’d never dreamt before. And also in terms of behavioural science, people are thinking in terms of, of trust, social contract adherence, all these issues, the things that used to be, you know, in the tutorial room are now out in society. And I think that’s really valuable. And I think we’ve seen the power of a knowledge based society, and asking what that means in practice, within government as well. I mean, the particular thing that interests me and pleases me is the recognition of the critical role of behavioural science, and the way in which it is critical in the response every bit as critical as the life science. And I think that has real implications for thinking about how that’s organised within government, and between government, the RSE and academia, and everything that is important in the last year or two will be even more important. I’m sorry to be miserable, just before Christmas been in the even bigger crisis before us, which is the climate crisis. So I think we need to learn and learn quickly, because otherwise, we’re in trouble. So, you know, it’s like, the old saying that, you know, if you think his education is, is costly, think about the cost of ignorance. So when it comes to climate crisis, the cost of ignorance will be the destruction of our species. So it’s worth thinking about that. The final point I will make is this. One of the things I like about this commission is not just the Commission, which tells everybody else what they need to do. It tells us what we need to do in the academic world. And I think some of the things we need to implement ourselves as a model to others we can’t ask for money from others unless we do it ourselves is to think about how we make ourselves open, how we make ourselves accessible, how we communicate, whether we put science communication in all our science courses, so let’s show that we can do it and then we’re a better position to ask others to do it.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 54:53
Absolutely, thank you very much Stephen and Niamh can I finally come to you about next step, the infrastructure in Scotland.

Professor Niamh Nic Daéid FRSE 55:00
Thanks, Talat. I’ll be very brief. Steve stole my thunder there because I was going to talk about science communication as it’s, it’s such a critical thing, I think in terms of again, going back and being able to have conversations about the what the science can tell us where we get the data from why we need that data, why it’s so important to have it. And then to use that to generate scientific output and communicated in a way that we can understand it and we can comprehend it ourselves. So that we can rationalise why we need to do certain behaviours. I think I’ve got picked back up on the Cabinet Secretary’s comments about about cross sectoral and cross government challenge. I think he’s entirely correct. This isn’t just one portfolio, this is across the whole of the portfolio’s of government and indeed, of the third sector. But my plea would be, you know, when when some funding, if there is some funding that comes forward is that it’s not funding, that’s the same as we’ve done before. And particularly for the third sector, giving third sector grants that are 12 months long, isn’t going to work, I would suggest, because it’s it’s such a short term, funding pot, that you spend half your time time trying to get the right person to do the job, and then the next half of your time trying to get the next pot of money. And so that type of funding the way in which we fund this, if indeed, the funding comes, and I think needs to be profoundly looked at, so that we can really do something that has a long the traditional difference and creates that long term change and shift in in what we need to do as a society. So So working together on what the next steps are, would involve, of course, government involves higher education involves the third sector, it involves both public and private sectors, I think as well and hello in, in, you know, in in, in reaching a conclusion to that journey towards that where we are now in terms of working out the next steps, but it is something that we all have to work on together echo Steve’s comments about climate change.

Talat Yaqoob FRSE 57:11
Excellent. Thank you to all the panel and our extra mini panellist. Welcome. Thank you to everybody. And thank you, for those who have been watching and participating just as a very quick summary, important things that are, you know, unsurprising that I’m taking away, taking this away from it and highlighting it but the importance of centering, tackling inequalities tackling systemic inequalities, and the voices and genuine partnership of marginalised groups within how we make decisions in Scotland and just emphasising Fiona’s point there, one of the audience members who has popped into the chat function of there being parity of esteem in who who has heard, and specifically she was talking here about disabled people, stating what was likely to happen, their experiences, and it not being embedded as part of the decision making. We can’t pay lip service to this. As Steven mentioned, it’s complex. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It requires resourcing time, effort and prioritisation. We talked about building trust. And we do that through honest, accessible public communication. We talked about intergenerational inequality, the importance of collective and community behaviour, not blame and division, but taking people with us on the decisions that we make. And we also talked about the importance of the infrastructure and making this report as something that is not simply gathering dust on a shelf, but is actually implementing change so that we are better resilient, better prepared, and a more equal society when facing future crises and, including the climate crisis that we are experiencing right here. And right now. A huge thank you to the panellists. Thank you to our RSE staff behind the scenes who make this happen. Can I just emphasise again, that there’s a little pinned point at the top of the chat function where you can read the full commission report, send it to others in a few months time, send it to your MSPs maybe give them a reminder that this thing exists and we expect nothing from it. But thank you very much indeed for listening and participating and enjoy the rest of your conference. Thank you. Thanks. Bye. Bye bye.