Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee
Sub-committee on Online Harms and Disinformation
Oral evidence: Misinformation and trusted voices, HC 597
Tuesday 10 January 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 10 January 2023.
Watch the meeting
Members present: Kevin Brennan; Damian Green; Clive Efford; Julie Elliott; Dr Rupa Huq; Simon Jupp; John Nicolson; Jane Stevenson.
In the absence of the Chair, Damian Green took the Chair.
Questions 64 - 168
Witnesses
I: Grant Hill-Cawthorne, Librarian, House of Commons Library; Callum Thomson, Group Head for Scrutiny, Scottish Parliament; and Patrick Vollmer, Director of Library Services, House of Lords Library.
II: Tracey Brown OBE, Director, Sense about Science; Dr Chris Smith, Clinical Director in Virology, University of Cambridge; and Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
Witnesses: Grant Hill-Cawthorne, Callum Thomson and Patrick Vollmer.
Q64 Chair: This is a meeting of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, part of our hearing on trusted voices. I am very pleased to welcome our first group of witnesses, who are Grant Hill-Cawthorne, the Librarian and Managing Director of Research and Information in the House of Commons, Patrick Vollmer, the Director of Library Services in the House of Lords, and down the line Callum Thomson, the Group Head for Scrutiny at the Scottish Parliament Information Centre. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you for helping us with our investigations into this important topic.
I will start with a question to all three of you. Each of you depends on being utterly reliable and utterly trusted. How do you decide which sources to trust? What principles do you operate under? Grant, I will start with you.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: A lot of this comes back to what Martin Lewis said. Trusted is about the trustworthiness of different sources. For us, what is key and part of our essence in the Library is that we are impartial and that MPs of all colours and backgrounds can rely upon us. Ultimately, the briefings that are used within the Chamber should be equally usable by anyone from the Conservative Party, Labour, SNP or any Opposition party.
To that end, we make sure that we use a full range of sources. With our briefings, we will look at the Government and what the Opposition parties are saying, but we will also look at the key commissions, the groups and think tanks that are known to be relatively impartial and centrist. We also make sure that we cover the full range of viewpoints within our briefings. We do not seek false balance, but we do seek to portray all the different viewpoints that are out there. If there are specific groups that have certain views, we will present those.
We always encourage our researchers—and this is why in the House of Commons they are always experts in their particular field—to give some interpretation on how reliable a source might be. If it is an evidence source, for example, they will be able to say that this is a trusted source, it has been peer reviewed, it is generally considered the norm within this area of research, but they can also say that there are extra views and alternative views that say X, Y or Z. We will always try to portray a range of views, but we will not necessarily just give over-due balance across a piece. We will focus on those that we consider to be most trustworthy and that are probably the majority opinion.
Q65 Chair: Patrick, do you operate on the same principles?
Patrick Vollmer: I think that Grant has covered an awful lot. I will add that I agree that it is about a range of sources, trying to reflect opinions on a policy area. We encourage our researchers to be critical and to think creatively about sources, to investigate sources, to see who has published it, who the author is, what the evidence is, and if there is quantitative or qualitative research done how well it was done and what the sample is.
The important thing is also about balance, which Grant mentioned. You have to be careful in distinguishing between something that is a fact and something that is an opinion. Somebody may have an opinion on something that you might quote, but then equally you need to make clear that that is an opinion and not a fact. I think that comes in particularly where you are looking at outside groups, so non-government particular interest groups or charities, think tanks and so on. It is that criticality, being critical with all sources. Just because it has been published by somebody who once was trusted, is it still trusted?
Callum Thomson: I do not have much to add there, other than to say that we work closely with trusted partners and those organisations that share our ethos or our values. In Scotland people like Audit Scotland or the Scottish Fiscal Commission, who do not have a particular agenda, are people who we particularly trust.
Q66 Chair: I got the sense from all the answers that there is a slightly circular argument here. Who do you trust? You trust the people you trust. We all know who the people are who you rely on, but in the end science can be challenged and things can be wrong. Covid is in the forefront of the mind, where a lot of misinformation was out there. It causes huge difficulties for things like social media platforms. Where does stopping people saying damaging things turn into censorship? I am interested. Are there actual principles you operate? I suppose that the question is: why do you trust the people who you have all just said you trust? What do they have to do to make themselves trusted? Is it history, experience or what?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Fundamentally, it is the way that they use evidence and data and the way that they present it. We always fully reference all our sources and we make sure that it is very easy to find where we get information from. Equally, when we are looking at sources to use, we want to know where they got their information from and what the basis is of that. That will be everything from, if it is going back to studies, how reliable the study is; was it on applicable groups; was it relative to the UK; did it have internal validity; was the methodology correct? All those questions come to mind.
You also get some reflection from the language that people use. It is very different if you take a group of evidence that is quite solid but then you apply emotive language or you overinterpret what it is saying versus the groups I can think of, like the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which will use very clear evidence, will reference what they are saying and then will use quite measured language in the same way that we would whenever we are presenting something.
Patrick Vollmer: In some ways, it was easier pre-internet because you had certain journals and certain publishers that you knew had a bit of authority. They were not going to publish something that was vanity publishing or a bit dodgy. With the advent of electronic information a lot more freely available—which is great and means that we can use that information in our briefings and people, the public and Members, can trace through where we got that information from—it is even more important than it has ever been to look, as Grant says, at how it is written. Who wrote it? Where do they come from? Where has it been published? How have they referenced it? What do those references look like? What are they saying in those references? How is it written? Have other people peer reviewed it? Has it been quoted anywhere else? All these things build a picture as to how authoritative something is.
Sometimes we get suggestions that there is a Facebook page with some statistics on it and we should be reproducing this in one of our briefings. Well, there is nothing there. There is no source. Where did you get that information from? You are saying that X% of people did Y. Where is the survey? Where are the results? Just because it has been published on Facebook or Twitter or somewhere does not mean that it is authoritative. There is a learning exercise as well there, I think, for trying to educate our readers that all sources are not equal. Just because it is on Facebook or anywhere—it is a bit unfair to quote Facebook, it could be anything—does not mean it is true, does not mean it is trusted and does not mean we can use it.
Q67 Chair: Callum, can I ask you one question that I suspect applies to all three? It is about training of new researchers. Clearly, individuals need to be taking the thoughtful approach you have all talked about. What training do they get?
Callum Thomson: I will go one step back and start with recruitment. We spend a lot of time recruiting people and then making sure they are coming into the Parliament for the right reasons and understand our ethos and our values. We then have a house style editorial approach, which it is important that all colleagues understand, and a quality assurance process that we go through. It is quite strict in the types of briefings and the extent to which material needs to be reviewed either internally or externally. It is very much a house style that needs to be followed and it is only when people are competent in that that they are allowed to go away and publish their own material.
Chair: Thank you. We will come back to the internet and its effect later in our questions.
Q68 John Nicolson: Thank you all for joining us. Callum, could I pick up on your last answer when you were talking about recruitment and training? Do you notice particular biases among your staff that you have to keep a watch on? To what extent does current debate and the fact that they are watching the same news as the rest of us, reading the same stuff on the internet as the rest of us—what biases do you think filter into the briefs that they write, especially new recruits? What do you do to control that, and do you notice any particular pattern?
Callum Thomson: We are very mindful of the dangers of groupthink. My office heads have regular training sessions on that with colleagues so that there is not a prevailing view, but rather that people are looking at each individual issue on its own merits. When I was talking earlier about the training and people understanding the ethos, that is exactly one of the issues that we are particularly strong on so that people then know that it is not an individual’s viewpoint but rather we are seeking out the various different sources and checking in with colleagues to develop what is credible before we publish that information.
Q69 John Nicolson: Are some briefs harder to write than others based on a lack of information in the public domain?
Callum Thomson: I think that is inevitably right, and there are particular areas that are contested. We are particularly mindful as to how briefings are going to be used by politicians or the wider public perhaps through the media. There are also other briefings that are just more difficult in getting that sense of balance. As Patrick referred to, we do not seek to provide complete and extensive balance. We point out where the evidence takes us, but we allow the reader to draw their own judgments, ultimately. It is for them to do that rather than for us to make value judgments.
Q70 John Nicolson: On that point, Grant and Patrick, as a new MP at the House of Commons Library, I was quite taken aback by the behaviour of some MPs I watched and the way that they treated the Library staff. One particular MP I noticed becoming very angry with library staff about the briefs that he was given because he simply did not accept the neutrality of the briefs. I know that this is something that broadcasters have had to wrestle with, for example, on climate science, though fortunately they no longer apply what they once thought was bias and which we now know is just bad science. What is it like to deal with politicians on this score? I will start with you, Grant.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: I don’t know how to answer that. There will be different views, and often by striking a balance and making sure that we are impartial, by its very nature, we are not going down a particular viewpoint. There have been a number of issues over the years—Brexit, some attitudes around Covid, and particularly in more recent times around transgender issues—where there are very polarised opinions on both sides. By taking a middle road and giving an impartial account that includes all those opinions, we will be upsetting certain groups. That is just part and parcel of the nature of our work.
Some MPs will complain to us about that, and we always take that feedback and ask someone more independent—so the head of section of that researcher—to have a look at the briefing and check whether the sources and language were correct and whether anything was missed. That tends to be what people say, “You didn’t quote X person”.
Q71 John Nicolson: You are the final authority on this?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Yes.
John Nicolson: You will just say to an MP, “I’m sorry, I have looked into this, and you can have as big a tantrum as you like but I do not agree with your complaint”?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: We have our editorial policy on our website,a and ultimately it will be my decision and that is final. We need to serve all 650 Members, so we cannot shoehorn someone’s particular opinion.
Q72 John Nicolson: Of course, Patrick, you have to serve thousands of Members of the House of Lords. I have lost track of how many there are now. Do peers have tantrums in the same way as some MPs?
Patrick Vollmer: I wouldn’t like to say they have tantrums. We do sometimes have an intense discussion, shall we say, and sometimes it is about the fact that we haven’t included a source that a Member is particularly keen on or has used.
John Nicolson: Like “GB News”, for example?
Patrick Vollmer: It could be. It could be any number of things. We do look at it and we respond to all feedback. We see whether we should have included it. If we should have done, we will amend the briefing. If not, we will explain why we are not amending it or why we do not think that source is particularly pukka. Equally, sometimes Members say, “You didn’t cover this particular aspect” and again we will look to see whether it fits in, whether it is line with the Bill or with the debate title on the Order Paper. We are not inhuman and we do make mistakes, we do miss things, and we will correct. It is rare that we do so but, as with Grant, my say-so is final. If it is not appropriate, we will not amend, we will not correct and we will not budge.
Q73 Clive Efford: Thank you for coming to give evidence today. Following on from John Nicolson’s questioning, Brexit must have been a complete nightmare for you. On the sources of information, how did you define trustworthiness when you were weathering the storm of the pre-Brexit referendum period and trying to find authoritative information and write reports that are balanced, given the overwhelming sea of nonsense and complete lies that was out there? How did you determine trustworthiness in that situation?
Patrick Vollmer: For us, a huge amount of work. By and large, in the Lords I have 15 researchers and we brief on all major items of business on the Floor of the House. While we have some specialists—we have a lawyer, a scientist, an economist—generally it works on the hackney carriages principle. You take the inquiry, the briefing, that comes your way and as you are rota’d in to do it.
For Brexit and one or two other things, we put together a specialist team of people who just worked on Brexit. We had two people working on Brexit for however many years. That is more or less all they did. They were covering absolutely everything. They were on top of all the sources. They took the time to look at absolutely everything to make sure that they understood where stuff came from and that the briefings were as impartial and as authoritative as was possible.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: We took a similar route. We had a larger team that comprised people from the library and people from the relevant committees. We had an editor who looked after all the briefings and who was completely across everything that was going out to make sure it was all in line. We tried to show the plethora of voices that were out there and the different evidence sources. We went back to our principles. Was there external and internal validity to what people were quoting? Was it factual or was it opinion? We would present it as such. Ultimately, it is not our job to draw conclusions, so you will not necessarily find conclusions within our papers. What we present is all the different viewpoints and the evidence that has been put forward, and it is up to the individual Member to draw their conclusion and use that as they wish.
Q74 Clive Efford: Similar to John Nicolson’s question, you must have been under an enormous amount of pressure to accept sources that perhaps you had already discounted and dismissed as not being trustworthy. How do you deal with those situations? The number of groups that were being financed and set up just to put a completely biased argument pre the Brexit referendum was enormous.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: We did it on the merits of each case. We would look at the group and see what it was quoting. If people were asking us—because any MP can ask us confidential requests—we would reply to that MP and say, “This is where they are misquoting this figure” or, “This is the evidence that they are using, and they are interpreting it in this way”. We would give that in exactly the same way as we—
Q75 Clive Efford: On Members’ reliance on the reports and advice that you give, is it the type of people you recruit that gives us confidence in what we get from you or is it the way that you go about your work? What is it about your Libraries that makes us trust in them as much as we do?
Patrick Vollmer: I think that it is a package of things. As Callum was saying earlier on, it starts with the recruitment. It starts even before that in how you design the roles, and the recruitment is a big part of it. We recruit with the skills that we need for particular areas. It is around the training, the monitoring and the supervision. All our published briefings have a dual editorial process attached to them. Sometimes, if it is particularly controversial, three people look at a briefing before it goes out. That is a published briefing rather than a bespoke inquiry. We have some very experienced researchers who will check and make sure. They will look not just for typos and grammar and what the style is but at what sources you have used. Have you cited them properly? Is there something missing? Can the reader follow what is being said? There is a whole process around this.
There is also then post-publication. Every two or three months there is a quality check. A team of people looks at a group of briefings and at how they could be improved and what we could do next time. We do learn. Every single briefing we do is better than the previous one because we are constantly learning from what we have done. There is a constant feedback loop. We also welcome feedback from Members who help us with this and say, “That was really good. Next time do you think that you could also perhaps expand on that area because I didn’t quite understand that?” That is helpful to us in getting a sense of what Members want and what they are looking for.
Q76 Clive Efford: Callum, do you have anything to add to any of that?
Callum Thomson: The only thing from a Scottish perspective is that in SPICe, the Scottish Parliament Information Centre, we are a little bit different from the Libraries in as much as the researchers also work for the Committees here. That means that they are working alongside Members in their various guises, whether they are responding to constituency inquiries or the readership of proactive briefings or—and this is probably the majority of the work—doing the briefings for committees. That means that they are developing a rapport with Members, and I think that helps to build trust between SPICe and the MSPs here.
Q77 Clive Efford: I will stick with you, but it is a question to all three of you—the last one. I asked how you define what is trustworthy and what trustworthiness is. What do you look out for to raise your alarm bells that this is not a trustworthy source? What things do you look out for in that respect?
Callum Thomson: I think that the lack of peer support for a particular viewpoint would certainly raise flags, so if it is a lone voice. It does not rule something out, but you are looking at the extent to which the views have been validated and where they are coming at it from. I guess it comes down to being a judgment call that is made by the individual researchers rather than being a precise formula. One thing that researchers spend a lot of time doing is developing their networks so they know who is credible and who is not. There is this built-in process that they are doing constantly.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: It comes down to what referencing they are doing for the information they are using. Does it go back to primary evidence or is it a number plucked out of nowhere? Is there cherry-picking of different statistics or ranges that are incomplete, or you do not know what the denominator for a percentage was, all these little things that you can pick up within other people’s briefings.
Usually, when someone has a partial approach in their writing, they will be using some kind of emotional language. They will draw in superlatives. They will be making points. You can pick up the way people are presenting. It is very hard, if you are passionate and you want to get a viewpoint across, to write completely neutrally. I don’t think those people really exist, so you can pick it up from people’s writing as well.
Clive Efford: Thanks for what you do.
Q78 Jane Stevenson: I want to think about the types of brief you are writing and the benchmark of trust on a different subject, so if something is highly complex and scientific, or if something is quite emotive and datasets have been produced with not an agenda but an obvious purpose to extracting the data. Is it a never-ending rabbit hole for researchers to inspect the data and then look at where that data came from and what study? How far back do people have to go when things get really complex?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: I look after two areas. One is the Library, and one is the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. POST does go back to the very original research evidence. It goes back to individual stakeholders and researchers out there. That will often try to address the more horizon-scanning difficult concepts where not much has been published. They will go out and interview lots of stakeholders. They will look at the primary research and then they will bring all that together into a briefing. That is a longer process.
Within the Library, we are looking much more reactively at what other people have published and using secondary evidence sources. Usually, it really is going back to that first trusted source. We talked before about what is trusted. It is looking at the references, going back to that trusted source and seeing whether what is being quoted is within the original report and has been honestly reproduced, and then working from that.
With statistics, we always go back to the actual official statistics. We will either go back to ONS-type data—and if you look at our data dashboards on our website, we reproduce all ONS data constituency by constituency—or we look for an Office for Statistics Regulation-accredited source, which always has a badge. Our two statistical teams always go back to the actual core data and do the analysis themselves.
Patrick Vollmer: My apologies; this sounds a little bit flaky, but if you have been doing research for a long while you also get a very strong inkling or feeling. That is the wrong word, but you have the experience to recognise when something is not quite right. You then tend to look more deeply at it. You have a fair idea of what people collect, how they go about collecting data, what types of data, what mechanisms they use, and that gives you a broad-brush approach to say, “That doesn’t look quite right. I will have to look at that a lot more” or, “That looks pretty good to me. I can trust that. I am not going to spend quite as long on that, and I am going to have a proper look at that”. Having an economist is hugely helpful for us, and I also have a data scientist. That really helps us to be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
Q79 Jane Stevenson: Is one economist enough?
Patrick Vollmer: It is. I have only 15 staff.
Callum Thomson: I think that with resources, Patrick may be more on the same page. In recognition of the growing complexity of this area, we are just in the process of recruiting our first dedicated statistician, given the rise of data and datasets and the need for all researchers to be across this. That is probably one of our learning areas. We cannot allow colleagues just to be strong in qualitative research. Now there is much more emphasis on data analysis, and that is what the statistician will be helping colleagues with.
Q80 Jane Stevenson: As you are working in the political landscape, should there be a higher benchmark? Is there one, and do you think that with the internet there is acceleration away from having that trustworthiness in you or do you think that you are one of the few places people can go back to?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: I know what you mean. I hope that people feel that they can trust us. We have the surveys of Members, and we are seen as trusted in those surveys. People come to us and ask us 18,000 questions a year, which suggests that MPs and their staff do trust us.
There are not many sources on the internet where you can get a truly impartial view that you know is impartial and has considered the various different areas and is also tailored for the parliamentary context. There are lots of people out there writing for journalists or out of academic interest or as part of their overall portfolio, but we have parliamentarians in mind. They are our primary audience. We are seeking to meet the legislative agenda. We are thinking about what is topical and what MPs need to know about. We constantly have you in mind as well, and I think that helps.
Patrick Vollmer: I think that is very true. The number one reason Members come to us is for impartiality. When we have had feedback from the public—and all our published briefings, all the briefings for business items in the Chamber, are on our website—they do appreciate the impartiality. We don’t draw a conclusion, as Grant said earlier on. We don’t tell you what to think. We present you with a neutral and hopefully reasonably interesting—but sometimes it is a bit dull because it is so neutral—account or narrative in digestible form, which allows politicians to participate in debates.
While the internet has speeded up the information flow and has meant that a lot more analysis needs to occur to see whether something is actually trustworthy or not, it does mean that the sources are widely available and people can trace them. Everything is referenced. That is the big thing that we both do, and Callum as well. Everything is referenced. We do not just put something in. I have to say that as a former researcher it always irritates me when I read a newspaper article and it says, “Such and such a university has done this piece of research on this”. Okay, can I have a link to it, please, so I can go straight to it? I am reading an electronic copy. I want to have a look at that. Sometimes you do not even get the university’s name or the researcher’s name. It is very vague, “This research has been done”. We don’t do that. We tell you what the research is, who it is, where it is, and we give you a link.
Q81 Jane Stevenson: Do you think that more people should be reading your website rather than the press?
Patrick Vollmer: Absolutely.
Q82 Jane Stevenson: Callum, do you have anything to add on that?
Callum Thomson: The first point is that I think there is value in the fact that we are seen as operating in the public interest and that we do not have any personal gain. There is a real strength in that. To give you one example, during Covid times one of our most popular blogs was simply a blog that we produced on trusted sources of information on Covid-19. I know that the Members really valued the fact that it came with that SPICe stamp.
On readership, yes, we encourage people to go our website, of course, and we promote our work through Twitter. One of the other things that is the case in Scotland, and I think is the case in Westminster as well, is that it is not uncommon to see the media picking up on the work of SPICe or the Commons and Lords Libraries. We are quite comfortable with that if it is a way of encouraging greater pick-up of what we are producing. We are not just relying on people stumbling across it on a website. There is a role for us to be promoting our work and getting it out there. We are not going to give an editorial view on it or advocate but just get it out there. It is something that researchers are increasingly conscious of. You cannot just rest on the qualitative research itself. There is a bit more to be done in making sure that it is actually read.
Q83 Jane Stevenson: Finally, when you are writing on something like Brexit or Covid that is very conflicting, in retrospect, after you have published, do you monitor whether you have annoyed everybody equally? Is that success? How do you judge if you have landed it in the right place?
Patrick Vollmer: I don’t know the answer to that, to be honest. We do irritate evenly, I like to think. The fact that people come back and that the usage of our product is going up I think is a real bonus. More and more Members want to use our information. More and more Members come to us for bespoke inquiries. There is also the fact that we are trusted by the press. We had two good shout-outs before Christmas in the press and they did put links in, which pleased me. I think that that says something.
We have worked hard. We are a much younger research service than the House of Commons and we have worked really hard at building a team and building trust. I am very conscious—and this sounds terribly trite, so apologies—that we are only as good as our next briefing. We have to constantly learn and evolve and take feedback, and listen to what Members have to say.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: I will say a similar thing. On certain controversial briefings we probably get a mixture of complaints, not usually from Members. Members know why we are here, that we are impartial and what we are trying to do. It tends to be different pressure groups in the public that will try to contact us on Twitter or via our e-mail address. Again, we are completely open to feedback and we have links on feedback and we want to make corrections. If we have missed something, we want to know that and correct it. On some controversial issues, we will get attacked from both sides, just because we have taken a middle of the road approach. Again, just as different Members of different parties will quote us in the same debate, and I see that as a big strength, different newspapers from across the political spectrum will quote us. We get as many quotes in The Guardian as we do in The Telegraph, so we must be doing something right in impartiality.
Q84 Jane Stevenson: Callum, is there anything that you would like to add?
Callum Thomson: I don’t think I have anything to add to that. It is the same issues on a different scale and through a slightly different political prism in Scotland.
Q85 Chair: Do you do anything proactive to publicise the fact that there is this cornucopia of well-researched information to the public? I am thinking particularly of schools, of sixth-formers and things like that. Do any of the libraries do that?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: We take part in Evidence Week, as you will hear in a minute. We are also part of the Parliament Week programme that goes out to universities and schools. We tend to find that lots and lots of schools particularly use POST work, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, because it is a good way of getting a quick explainer on various subjects. I have lots of PhD students who come to me and say, “I am starting out my thesis. We read your paper because it covers everything and is well referenced and is a good source.” We are also active on Twitter.
We know that we are read because our website gets about 8 million to 9 million hits a year. I am sure that MPs are not reading us 8 million times, so the public are using us. Our cost of living briefing this week has been read 17,000 times. It is a source of information that people can rely upon.
Patrick Vollmer: While not as popular as the House of Commons, we do get a million hits a year, which is quite something. We have a lot less product and, as I say, they are completely focused on work in the Chamber. We have done some outreach through universities. We don’t do enough. We probably could do more, but the website shows that our stuff is used. We have anecdotal feedback that it is used in schools and universities and by various interest groups. We could do more. The House of Lords and the parliamentary and House of Commons communications offices do a really good job of promoting all our products in their social media, so we get quite a lot of hits through that as well.
Q86 Chair: Callum, how many hits are you getting, while we are all boasting about how big our hits are?
Callum Thomson: I knew you were going to ask me that. I don’t have a number off the top of my head. I am sure it is somewhat less than the House of Commons but still a very healthy number. I can let you know if you are interested.
Q87 Chair: Do you make efforts to sell yourself to the public?
Callum Thomson: Yes. We work closely with our media relations colleagues because that is probably the best way in which we can get some of our messages out there. The other thing that I will flag up is how closely we work with the education service, particularly at the secondary level, and modern studies or politics students will have a very full understanding of the role of SPICe within the work of Parliament. Again, I am sure that there is more that we could do.
Q88 Julie Elliott: Good morning. Clearly, you are a trusted source. We all view you as a trusted source. What do you think are the key challenges of being trusted in a highly political environment as opposed to working in a different environment?
Patrick Vollmer: Maintaining that trust. That is our biggest risk—that we make a mistake, that we overlook something, that something goes wrong somewhere. The way we maintain that trust is through editorial processes, training, recruitment, supervision, listening to feedback, and constantly developing and training our staff in everything from grammar to research, data science and statistics. Staff are encouraged to go along to external events, for example at Chatham House, to further their knowledge, to build their knowledge on various areas. Continuous improvement and continuous development is how we build that trust. We don’t rest on our laurels, put it that way.
Q89 Julie Elliott: Do you publicise how Members can feed back to you?
Patrick Vollmer: Yes.
Q90 Julie Elliott: If I received something and I thought, “I’m not sure about this”, how would I feed that back to you?
Patrick Vollmer: At the bottom of every single e-mail that you get from us is a feedback link to give us feedback. On the printed copy there is an e-mail address and Members are encouraged to feed back to us. We do surveys of Members.
Q91 Julie Elliott: Is that the same in the House of Commons?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Yes, it is the same for us. Every one of our briefings has an e-mail address at the bottom where you can get in contact with us.
Q92 Julie Elliott: At the Scottish Parliament Information Centre, Callum, how do you define impartiality and how do you ensure that everything is impartial?
Callum Thomson: Gosh.
Julie Elliott: Just a starter for 10.
Callum Thomson: Obviously, impartiality takes lots of different forms and political impartiality is probably the thing that I am most concerned about, given our audience. At the risk of repeating myself, it goes back to what we have all talked about in inculcating colleagues with our ethos and our standards and then trusting colleagues who we have spent a lot of time recruiting. I can’t give you a very glib, one-sentence answer on what constitutes impartiality. That will mean different things in different circumstances.
As I think that Patrick said earlier, impartiality is the most important thing, and if we lose that we have lost everything. Yes, our reputation is built on lots of things, including a strong track record over the last 20 years, but if we lose the trust of a particular political party that would be a very retrograde step from my perspective. We spend a lot of time on relationship management with individuals who may not love a particular briefing, but it is important that they understand the role of SPICe so that even if they disagree with a particular briefing, they will understand the work that we do.
Q93 Julie Elliott: This is to all three of you. You have talked quite a lot about people specialising when it is difficult topics, and the constant training and things. What is your turnover of staff? How constant are the people who work in all your organisations? We will go to Callum first.
Callum Thomson: Low, I would say. We have some turnover but compared to the parliamentary service as a whole it is very low. Certainly, we have researchers who have been with us for the entire duration of the Parliament, so 20-plus years. There is not a terrific career ladder, so I think that we are doing something right in the working environment and people getting a sense of job satisfaction, that there is value in what they do. Basically, it is low in parliamentary terms and very low compared with the private sector.
Patrick Vollmer: Our turnover is very low. We have staff who have served 10-plus years. I have been in the House of Lords for 20 years, first as a researcher and then through various other posts. Again, there are not many career opportunities in the Library and staff don’t tend to move out of the Library. They do occasionally. We had one leave early last year. They do stay for a good time and that has huge advantages because they build up so much experience. What we offer them in exchange is a good working environment and an interesting job, a job that matters, where you can see that people are using your work. More or less every day is different. Something else comes along and you get to do it and you get to be part of what is happening. There is also something about Members being grateful for what we do. They appreciate what we do and there is a purpose to what we do.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Similarly low. Our turnover rate is about 6% to 7% a year, which is much lower than, say, the Civil Service or even other parts of Parliament. Part of that is that we similarly have quite a flat structure. There aren’t many places to go for promotion, but you become the expert within your field. You are known within Parliament as being the expert within that topic.
We are an older service, and I have some members of staff who have been with us for 40-plus years working on a particular topic. When you have a person who is an expert in defence or housing who has been doing it for 40 years, they have seen all the different political cycles come through. They have the historical knowledge to go back and say, “This has been tried before” or, “I know where this has this bit of evidence” or where different bits of legislation have fed through to where we are today. That knowledge is incredibly important for us.
As Patrick said, they find it an incredibly rewarding job. We deal with 18,000 questions a year. That means we have direct contact with Members and Members’ staff. We are answering their questions. Often we build up relationships with particularly Front Benchers or people with a particular policy interest, and they will immediately know to come on the phone to the specialist to talk through a problem or a policy idea. Our people thrive upon that. It is a fascinating job.
Q94 Simon Jupp: Thanks very much for coming in this morning. When there is a lack of consensus on an issue—you have already touched on a few national policies that have been difficult over the last couple of years—how do you convey that in a brief? It must be very difficult to please everyone all the time and almost impossible.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: We definitely cannot please everyone, but we can make sure that all the information is there so that if someone does have a particular political viewpoint, they can find the bits of evidence that they want for their viewpoint. We will, as far as possible, identify all the different viewpoints, the different bits of evidence, and where it conflicts. We will talk about where things are consistent or not consistent with the wider evidence or policy landscape. Then we will try to give some indication of the weighting—the majority of people believe this, a minority believe this.
POST has been around for 30 years. One of its most controversial briefings back in 1990 was on the science of carbon dioxide and the link between that rise. It got a big backlash there, but it said that a significant minority of people are looking at carbon dioxide levels rising and are concerned about greenhouse gases. Then you can look at how our briefings have evolved over time to the point now where we do not really need to talk about minority views on greenhouse gas emissions because it is much better established as a fact.
Simon Jupp: As time goes on, you have to revise briefs and change them and contextualise, and things like that.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Constantly, yes.
Simon Jupp: I think that you are hinting there that some opinions that perhaps were at the forefront at one point, or at least a thought in people’s minds, may now be to a point irrelevant.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Yes, and we update all our briefings. Within the library we update things in real time as particular topics develop. We hold horizon scanning meetings constantly to make sure that we know what is happening. A big new report has come out; we make sure that our briefings are updated on that so they should all be at the forefront.
Covid was a great example of how this can work in real time. We published 50-plus briefings just on the science of Covid, one a week, looking at how things have changed and saying what has gone out the window and what is important now.
Patrick Vollmer: I think that it is about reflecting different opinions and making sure you have reflected opinions and the evidence correctly. In a sense, we have a slightly easier life because our work is based upon what is happening in the Chamber. We very rarely do a standalone piece that is not currently being debated in the Chamber. They have a shorter shelf life, if that makes sense. We do not go updating them. In many ways, it is a bit easier for us.
It goes back to all the things we have said about using trusted sources. Balance does not mean giving equal weight to all voices. It is much more nuanced than that, and that comes down to the experience of the authors, the editors, the head of research, and then, if it ends up with me, my experience.
Q95 Simon Jupp: Callum, do you have anything to add on the challenges you face?
Callum Thomson: Not very much, other than to say that we do not seek to make conclusions or recommendations on this. That makes it a little bit easier. Rather, we seek to unpack the arguments. We might highlight inconsistencies or where the weight of evidence is, but the fact is that we do not make that final conclusion or recommendation. We leave it to others to do that. It perhaps makes it a little bit easier rather than, say, a committee that ultimately has to come down and give a particular viewpoint. There the role of researchers is somewhat different.
Q96 Simon Jupp: Every now and then you will get criticism from peers. You will have criticism from MSPs or from Members of the House of Commons. What about third-party organisations that decide to attack the data that you put together? How do you deal with that? Do you feel a little bit defenceless, or are you able to be quite bullish about the way that you have set out the information and you seek to inform not just Members but the public as well?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: We get lots of pressure groups that will try usually to get us to include a particular thing that they have published. They might be quite a partial group that has published a report that we have not included in a debate pack, and they will get quite aggrieved at that. As I said before, we will always judge that on its merits. We will look at it. We will decide whether it was a conscious decision not to include it or whether we simply missed it. If we don’t feel that it should be included, we will say that back to them and give them an explanation why. Again, with that caveat—
Q97 Simon Jupp: Do they fight back? Do they then come back to you and say, “That is wrong. How can I challenge this?” Say, for example, I was a third-party pressure group and you decided to do something that I disagreed with and did not include my marvellous report that I spent at least half an hour writing. What would you then do? What is the process?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: The individual researcher would e-mail back and say, “This is why I didn’t include it”. If they then appealed that, it would go to the researcher’s head of section, who would step back and take a look. If they continued to press, the director of research would look themselves, and her decision is final. We have that all clearly on our website. Ultimately, the director of research’s decision is final for outside groups. For MPs, it will come to me, and my decision will be final. We are an independent publishing body, effectively. We will not just include things.
Q98 Simon Jupp: I am guessing that it is similar in the Lords, Patrick.
Patrick Vollmer: It is very similar. Sometimes you just have to bring feedback to an end because it is not going anywhere, occasionally. That is a bit sad because someone is clearly very passionate about something, but the argument is not really there.
Simon Jupp: I sympathise, as a Member of Parliament. Yes, so it is like that, is it? There is a process?
Patrick Vollmer: It is like that, yes.
Q99 Simon Jupp: I am guessing that it is the same with you, Callum. There is an appeals process but at the end of the day the decision is final.
Callum Thomson: Exactly that. We will have different levels of discussion. We will seek to engage with the person. We do not have a huge amount of this, I should say. Probably where we have it more is academics might disagree with a particular slant or a particular briefing. We will seek to engage. We will check our processes and then ultimately if we are confident with our judgment, we will say that, and we will politely agree to disagree.
Simon Jupp: Understood. Thank you.
Q100 Kevin Brennan: Do we need two research services in the Houses of Parliament? Would it not be more efficient just to have one, since you are doing the same thing?
Patrick Vollmer: That is a historic—
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Perennial question.
Patrick Vollmer: —perennial question.
Kevin Brennan: What is the answer?
Patrick Vollmer: I have a short answer and I have an eight-hour lecture on the subject.
Kevin Brennan: Try the short one.
Patrick Vollmer: I will try the short one. We are serving different markets, different user groups. Our work is very much tailored towards the House of Lords and what Members are interested in. In the House of Commons, you have constituency inquiries as well. We just focus on Chamber work because Members do not have constituencies. The two libraries work very closely together. The researchers communicate with each other, share information and ask each other questions. When we look at the actual library with the stock, the databases we procure, the newspapers and all the rest of it, we work hand in glove and the two libraries are umbilically connected.
As I say, there is a longer narrative around this. I do not believe that you make any gain from merging the two research services. I think that there are lots of downsides to doing it and I am not convinced that there is a benefit to doing it at the moment. However, it is a perennial question and we continue to think about these things.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Looking at the two services, we have very different customer groups. In the same way that the two Houses work very differently, the requirements are very different for the two groups.
A lot of our time is taken up answering the difficult constituency inquiries. You get thousands in your postbag a week. About 5% of those would come through to us because they are much more difficult to answer or they need more interpretation, and we will help with those. We proactively publish about 1,000 topical briefings a year, which anticipate your needs, everything from what is happening in Ukraine to Afghanistan to Covid, so that you have something at your fingertips when you need it.
Then we also have the different legislative stages. We produce briefings at Second Reading and at later stages whenever it comes to the Commons and make sure that that is ready for you.
Q101 Kevin Brennan: It sounds to me like they could easily be merged, couldn’t they? There is always a reason why not and it is unlikely to happen, given the way that change moves in this place.
I was interested in the discussion we were having about people challenging research reports. I think that it is possibly the first time I have ever had it, but recently I had a bit of a postbag about one of the reports—I think that it was about the blood contamination scandal—produced by the House of Commons Library. I was slightly at a loss that I had to answer it because I am so used to just assuming that the House of Commons Library briefing will be impartial, well researched and so on. Did that come across your desk?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Yes, it did come to me.
Q102 Kevin Brennan: How was that resolved and was there anything in the complaint?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: There were two parts, and one part of the complaint was upheld and we adjusted the briefing. In that one, there was a particular bit of information around who published what, whether it was the Government that published a report versus it being independently published. That was misquoted, so we accepted that and adjusted it. The other part was about something that was not included and again, as I said before, we did not feel that it should be included and we replied back. We are always open to that kind of feedback. No one is infallible and we want to always learn and improve upon the stuff that is out there.
Q103 Kevin Brennan: On that point—you may have done, I don’t know—would you then report to Members that there was a report and there was a complaint upheld about the report, in case Members had relied upon it or replied to their constituents saying, “How dare you challenge the impartiality of our wonderful service”?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: If it was something that was going to be important and was still current we would alert Members who had used it or who had used it in answer to a request. We also make it very clear as part of our corrections policy on the landing page where we have corrected things, and we will say why we have corrected it as well.
Q104 Kevin Brennan: Callum, do you make use of the national academies very much in compiling reports and so on?
Callum Thomson: Not a huge amount, to be honest. We have very close links with the Royal Society of Edinburgh, but even that could be stronger. That is potentially an area and a source that we could use more. More generally, our linkages with academia have been a big growth area over the last 10 years as part of the impact agenda that now exists. Certainly, we benefit from close working relationships with a number of schools within individual universities and that extends out to the national academies. It is something that I think we could do more of. There may be more experience of that within the Commons.
Q105 Kevin Brennan: I think that I heard you say you probably could use them more. Was that correct in your answer?
Callum Thomson: That is right, yes.
Q106 Kevin Brennan: Do you think that their profile is too low and that is part of the reason that they do not get used as much as they could be used?
Callum Thomson: Probably, yes, is the short answer. In my experience, I still think that working with Parliament and Government is a relatively untapped area as far as academia is concerned. I am always surprised that academics are still surprised at the pace at which Parliament works and the nature of the work and what that means in how they can best serve the work of Parliament and Government. We spend a lot of time working with universities and other sectors to explain the work of the Parliament. I guess I am a little bit surprised that we are still having some of the conversations that we are having 10 years on, I would suggest, but I think that there is more that I could do and there is probably more that the national academies could do as well.
Q107 Kevin Brennan: Can I ask Grant and Patrick the same question about the national academies?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Yes. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology works with them very closely. There is a member of each of the four national academies of England on the POST board, which is also made up of MPs and Lords, that helps to determine the work programme, so they do feed into that. They are a good source to identify stakeholders for the longer process reports that POST does.
For the House of Commons Library, it is tricky for the reasons Callum has said—the pace of things. Often we will be asked a question that needs an answer within 48 or 72 hours, and it can be hard to get academics to respond to that. What is more useful is for our researchers to already have the networks and the relationships with people. We encourage that, so that they know who the key people in the field are. They have a good working relationship with them and they can send them an e-mail and get a quick response.
We also have a knowledge exchange unit and we have spent a lot of time trying to build up the experience of academia to work with us. We have connections within all the universities in England now and across the UK. We know who to go to for different topics and we will encourage them, but again the speed and pace can be quite difficult.
Q108 Kevin Brennan: I noticed that you used the term “England” quite a lot there. It is a UK Parliament, though, isn’t it?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: We are a UK Parliament. I was saying England because Callum was talking about Scotland, but we work with all UK universities.
Q109 Kevin Brennan: Patrick, on the national academies question?
Patrick Vollmer: The simple answer is no. I suspect that we could do a lot more. The problem is, as Grant has said, the pace of work, the speed with which we need to complete work. That generally applies to academia and to the national academies that we need an answer quickly. Phoning up a friend and saying, “I need a response within 30 minutes” is very often not doable.
Q110 Kevin Brennan: Would it be a sensible proposal from this Committee when we write our report on all this to say that to strengthen the quality of trusted sources in this country, the national academies ought to consider having a much speedier response mechanism at their fingertips?
Patrick Vollmer: That would be really helpful.
Q111 Dr Rupa Huq: Thank you to the House of Commons Library. I think that I have been identified as a heavy user whenever there are surveys.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: That is a compliment.
Dr Rupa Huq: It is partly because my office is so far away that on a Monday night it is a good place to work between votes. Thank you, all three of you, for what you do.
At the beginning of this hearing, I think that Patrick said the internet has changed everything. I just wanted to tease that one out a bit. Has social media changed everything even more? The three of you look quite young. Maybe you did not operate in the Library before the internet.
Patrick Vollmer: No, I certainly did.
Dr Rupa Huq: How much has it gone from being a physical building where MPs like to sit on a comfy chair on a Monday night and do their research or whatever to an online resource? I want to ask those questions.
Patrick Vollmer: For the Lords, it has changed dramatically. There have been a number of step changes. One of them was the sheer availability of information on the internet from about 2005 or 2006. I can remember the days when to look at a Government report you had to get a hard copy. Nowadays you can quite quickly find it, which is fantastic, and it means that other people can see that as well.
Dr Rupa Huq: Find the words within it as well.
Patrick Vollmer: Yes, exactly. Things like the greater availability of databases and the improved quality of databases—the two Libraries subscribe to a number of databases—allows a lot quicker turnaround of information. You do not have to write off to some company to purchase something.
A big step change for us was the pandemic. Where we had previously produced a lot of paper copy, all of a sudden our customers were having to use electronic and that has had a big impact on us. They have not stopped using it. Yes, we still produce paper copies for Bill briefings, but for debates and for various other things it is electronic only. We can print it out if you want, but it is on demand. That has been the big change for us.
The other change that has occurred is in on-demand publishing. That has caused us problems with the Library’s collections. There are a lot of people who self-publish, what we used to call vanity publishing, and that is much easier now. You have this whole new sphere of so-called published books that are coming at you, and you do not have to be a publishing company to put them out. There is a job there not just for our researchers but primarily for our librarians to weed out, to see what is important, because book loans are still a big part of what we do.
The plethora of websites and social media means that researchers need to spend a lot more time investigating how authoritative a source is than they previously did. As I said earlier, it was much easier when it was all printed and when it cost a fortune to print a book or a journal.
Q112 Dr Rupa Huq: Does it cost a lot to subscribe to academic journals? When you go on as a member of the public it says X hundred pounds. I still cannot get The Daily Telegraph, I have to say. I know that we can get The Times through our iPad. I don’t know if there is a way around.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: You can.
Dr Rupa Huq: If someone can sort me The Telegraph, it would be good to see what—
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Yes, we will get in touch with you about that.
Dr Rupa Huq: Thank you. Just generally—
Chair: Newspapers are available.
Dr Rupa Huq: Yes.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: I have been in Parliament since 2018. I did not work here before, but I know from members of staff who did work here before that the pace has definitely picked up. By having so much information, the nature of work has changed. We used to have a lot of librarians who would do press cuttings. They would clip out. They would keep big journals on a topic like social security and cut out and paste in all the different bits that were coming out in the news each week. We do not need to do that any more, but with the sheer amount of information that is coming out—reports, think tanks have grown—there is a lot of stuff that we need to be constantly keeping abreast of. That is where some of the busyness has come from.
It has also meant that the nature of some of our work with MPs has changed. We have some MPs who have very good face-to-face contact with our Members’ library and will come in and make requests in person, but most ask their staff to make requests. They do that via e-mail, and it means that we do not necessarily have one-to-one personal contact. Some of our researchers miss that. It makes it harder to clarify a request as well. If you get an e-mail through that simply asks a question, sometimes if you are on the phone you could have a back and forth and clarify exactly what someone wants and make sure you get the right timeline. You might even be able to answer it there and then. We have lost that to e-mail. Most of our 17,000 requests are now e-mail compared to telephone or face to face, which they would have been five to 10 years ago.
Q113 Dr Rupa Huq: Callum, you have been there from the beginning, I think. What about things like microfiche? When I worked in libraries in the 1980s that was a big thing. I think that CD-ROM was being invented by the time I was leaving. Do those things still exist? How have libraries changed since the internet?
Callum Thomson: Just about, I think. Certainly, SPICe is very much a digital-led service now. We introduced blogs about three or four years ago—a shorter format, a quicker end product—which has probably been the most significant change in my time. We no longer write in a Microsoft Word document. Rather, people are writing for the web, so the content can then be shared or the individual sections can be shared. We try to keep track of that, and that has required a change in how the individual researchers work. There is a slight difference with the methodology that they have to take.
It has definitely evolved, and there are things that were big 20 years ago that have pretty much gone to nothing, but there are services that are still well loved by Members. Physical copies of local newspapers are still a well-regarded service for Members, but it was a bigger thing 20 years ago than it is right now.
Q114 Dr Rupa Huq: Was yours always called “information centre” and not “library” from the start? I know that local authority libraries have had a rebrand and some of them are called an “idea centre” and not “library” any more. They all have computers in them, and some are also volunteer led. Other local authorities have had to close down the physical buildings with loads and loads of books in them.
Callum Thomson: I think that was a conscious decision back in the mists of time that it should not just be seen as a library with maybe a particular connotation around that. It also covers research inquiries and collections. I think that there was a view at the time that perhaps “library” gave a slightly old-fashioned view of the type of service that was being provided. That is possibly quite a controversial comment to chuck in at this late stage.
Q115 Dr Rupa Huq: For the three of you, do you think that you are operating on two levels—not just the politicians but the public as well? We know that it is a badge of honour to say House of Commons Library figures or House of Lords Library or whatever. Do you have divergent Jekyll and Hyde, two different audiences that you are aiming at? What are the advantages and disadvantages of that?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Our principal audience is definitely MPs and their staff, but we recognise that we can make the lives of MPs and their staff easier by making our stuff available to the public. We can almost see off some of the many e-mails that you get each week simply by answering what are very common constituency questions on our website. Three years ago we launched a new product called Constituency Casework, which is exactly that. If you want to know how leasehold reform works or you want to know what your rights are as a renter, you just Google it and you will find our website and that should answer it so that you do not have to e-mail your MP. Part of our job of helping you is to make sure that the public are well informed.
Patrick Vollmer: For us, our primary audience is Members, the same as for the House of Commons, but we try to write in a way that is clearly understandable. We try to write in plain English, or whatever you want to call it—whatever terminology you want to use. We have moved away from the slightly stilted—not just slightly, very stilted—briefings that we used to write in responses to inquiries so that they are more accessible for Members and for the public. It has been a nice benefit of the website that the public have been able to use our products much more and that they clearly are using them.
Q116 Dr Rupa Huq: Presumably, there is more demand on yours because Peers do not have a budget for a researcher that you pay for.
Patrick Vollmer: Exactly. Our briefings are very much targeted. The general rule is that it should not take you more than an hour to read one of our briefings. Members tell me that they have two hours if they want to participate in a debate: one hour to do the research and one hour to write their speech. We are very targeted, and we try to frontload the information as best we possibly can and then signpost through the note.
Q117 Dr Rupa Huq: For the three of you, how much would you see public outreach as part of your role? I know that the House of Commons Library now does talks and all these other extra things—briefings and stuff—for our staff, I think, primarily. How accessible do you want to be to the actual public? I know that when the Short money was being cut, one of the reasons was because there is the internet now, so you do not need all this. Should it be a secret service just for politicians or do you try to go to schools or wherever? Would you ever do any of that stuff?
Patrick Vollmer: We are a small service, so it is difficult for us to go out to schools, but I am very keen that our information is published on the internet and is accessible, readable and usable by people. We see it as part of our role of supporting Members in their parliamentary work but also supporting an understanding of what the House of Lords does. I think that we do that quite well.
We also have a niche market of notes specifically on the House of Lords to try to explain what it does, the numbers of Members, party affiliation and all the rest of it. Again, that is quite popular for people trying to find out about the House of Lords.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: We have an editor who looks specifically at our briefings to make sure that all our language is accessible, that it is easy to understand and that our headings get the SEO—the search engine optimisation—that we need. We recognise that MPs, their staff and members of the public use Google.
Dr Rupa Huq: All these things are visible from everywhere; you do not have to just be within the—
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Yes. We have our confidential request service, which is just to the MP in question, but we publish all our briefings on our website. They come up highly in the rankings on Google, so the public can access it just as well as you can.
Q118 Dr Rupa Huq: Is that the same in Scotland?
Callum Thomson: Absolutely in how we provide the service. I don’t see us as having that front-line education role. We have a particular education service that has that function, but SPICe’s primary customers are elected Members. Within that, SPICe has a responsibility to enhance the scrutiny function of Parliament and the wider role of improving the Parliament’s reputation as a relevant and trusted institution. That informs the type of proactive work that we do there. We try to convey that when we liaise with education colleagues on how the parliamentary service functions and SPICe’s pivotal role within that.
Q119 Dr Rupa Huq: Lastly, do you service journalists’ requests? We have talked about different timescales and the academic one that is really slow—I don’t know, six months to write a journal article. For the parliamentary one, they want an answer by midday when that Question Time is. There is also the journalist one.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: Journalists will often contact us about one of our briefings and ask us specific things. If our researchers have time, they will answer that. We want to be helpful, and we want to inform public debate as much as possible. If someone needs clarification, we will answer it if we have time. We are not principally there to serve journalists, but we will help if we can.
Patrick Vollmer: It is the same thing for us. We occasionally get an inquiry through the comms office, but we do not get approached directly. Again, it is usually then sending out a note that we have already published.
Q120 Dr Rupa Huq: Has social media dumbed down things? If people make a speech just for a 20-second clip on social media, has that made your job harder?
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: The most difficult thing about social media is that people will often contact us a lot via it about our briefings. If they disagree, they might e-mail us and then we can have a proper conversation, or they might just attack us on social media and that is much more difficult to deal with. We do not want to get into protracted debates on social media with individuals and we tend not to. I think that is more the risk for us.
Chair: I am slightly conscious that we are drifting away from the subject of trusted voices. Patrick, you were about to say something.
Patrick Vollmer: Only that we do not have a dedicated Library Twitter feed for precisely that—well, it is one of the reasons, and also the maintenance required to do it. We just cannot do that. It is a bit of a cop-out, I am afraid.
Q121 Dr Rupa Huq: The last word from Scotland on social media or not?
Callum Thomson: We do have a Twitter feed there, which is distinct from other parliamentary ones. I think that is an important way of getting our information materials out there. We have invested a fair amount of time and effort in that over recent years.
Going back to the point about journalists, yes, we will sit down with journalists to explain briefings, and they know the basis on which researchers are doing that. Then people do not misuse this. That has been very useful to explain some of the more technical things, and people respect the impartiality of colleagues and do not abuse that in their reporting.
Q122 John Nicolson: I wanted to finish off, Callum, by saying that it seems to me that we have more information these days than we have ever had in the past, and yet sometimes democracy looks a little bit fragile, doesn’t it? You look at the United States storming of the Capitol and the events in Brazil over the last few days—people fuelled up by disinformation. In that context, what role do you think you can play going forward to counter this disinformation and, if it is not too grand, to defend democracy in the process?
Callum Thomson: It is important that we have a very healthy parliamentary service, and within that is the role of the impartial libraries or information centre as in Scotland. It is resourced to do the job that it is facing, and undoubtedly it has become more complex in recent years. Our job is much harder than it was about 10 years ago, so it is about making sure that the services, as a result of—
John Nicolson: Is it harder because of disinformation?
Callum Thomson: Yes, and also the pace at which things operate and the contested nature of what is going on across the United Kingdom. All these things coincide to make the work of researchers much harder, but I go back to what I said before about making sure that we recruit well, we train well and we have the systems in place to ensure we have confidence in the product.
Q123 John Nicolson: Can I ask you to address the same question? When you see the Capitol being stormed, when you see the Brazilian Parliament being stormed, these people have been fuelled by lies that they have read online. What can you do to help promote and defend democracy? I am not talking just about parliamentarians. I am talking about the general public as we go forward, because this seems to be a pressing ongoing problem that is only going to get worse.
Grant Hill-Cawthorne: A big part of that is making sure that all of our research briefings are available online so that there is an impartial view on a topic out there that journalists can pick up on. I am often asked by researchers whether we should proactively be doing fact-checking. We have tended to shy away from that, mainly because there are other people—there is Full Fact, and there is the BBC reality check—that already do that, but also it is tricky from an impartiality standpoint to choose what you might fact-check, at times. I would not want to risk our impartiality by someone saying, “Why did you check that fact but not the fact from that group?” We will do that for MPs, though. If MPs want to check something that they have read, they can confidentially contact us, and we will always provide that service and give them what we think is an honest answer.
Patrick Vollmer: There are two points. One of them is that we need to continue using as many accessible sources in our briefings as we can. The second point is that I have often thought of having big posters made that say something like—I am not a marketing expert, but maybe a Member here can help me with the wording—“Fake news: come and see the House of Lords Library, who will help you sort it out”. That is too long; it needs to be more snappy. But I have often thought of this, because that is what we do. That is what libraries have always done, and that is what they are there for—to help you sort this out.
I think that there is a lot more we could do for Members rocking up and saying, “I have just seen this, and I am not happy about it”, and knowing that they can do it. There is sometimes a reluctance to probe a piece of dodgy information.
Chair: Thank you to all our witnesses in our first panel: Grant, Patrick and Callum. Thank you very much for giving us a lot of clear and thought-provoking information. We will now set up for our second panel, who have been waiting patiently, I can see. We will restart again in five minutes.
Witnesses: Tracey Brown OBE, Dr Chris Smith and Bob Ward.
Q124 Chair: Welcome back, everybody, and welcome particularly to our second panel, who are Chris Smith, the clinical director in virology at the University of Cambridge and presenter of “The Naked Scientists” podcast; Tracey Brown, director of Sense about Science; and Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. Welcome, all. Thank you very much for helping us this morning. I am conscious that you have to disappear at 12.15, so we will try to be as crisp as possible.
Covid has clearly been one of the issues that has dominated the whole debate about science, fake news and so on. Who did you look to for advice during Covid, particularly in the early stages when we knew less than we know now? I will move along the panel that way.
Dr Smith: “The Naked Scientists”, which is also a radio show on the BBC and on the ABC in Australia, made one of the first radio programmes about Covid back in 2020. It was the beginning of January. The reason is that one of my roles as a virologist at the University of Cambridge is to teach the medics, the vets and the natural scientists all about emerging infections. When I looked at what was coming out of China, this had all of the ingredients for what could be a future pandemic, and it ticked all the boxes. It was almost like history repeating itself in the lectures I have been giving. That is what put it on my radar, and as well as making programmes about it, I immediately began to talk to my colleagues in the virology community. We all agreed this was a potentially huge threat.
Q125 Chair: You, as virologists, had to educate other scientists that this was the big one?
Dr Smith: I remember going to BBC Breakfast in Salford and I took with me a graph from Wuhan. I showed it to one of the producers and it was showing exponential growth of cases. I said, “That is probably coming here,” and they rolled their eyes and said, “We have heard all that before”. Two months later that is exactly what happened.
Chair: Two months?
Dr Smith: This was January, and I was here in London on about 20 March doing a programme on “PM” with Evan Davis. It was the day before the country was closed for business, effectively, when the lockdown was announced. It was almost two months to the day that we made those initial predictions.
Q126 Chair: Were you telling people inside Government as well? It is all very well going on BBC Breakfast, but Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and all these people—did they know two months before?
Dr Smith: What became apparent quite quickly was that there were very few virologists on any of the advisory committees. I am part of something called the Clinical Virology Network, the CVN, which is a big group of virologists across the country who run and operate diagnostic laboratories, like the UKHSA laboratory at which I am a consultant. We did alert Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty that there was a paucity at the coalface of virological input to a lot of these panels. We offered our services, but it was declined.
Tracey Brown: Sense about Science is an organisation that promotes the public interest in sound science and evidence. We work with different communities to pursue their questions. I think that we were confronted with the same issue that will confront this Committee in writing a report, which is that being trusted and being right are not quite the same thing. Many of your previous witnesses have described the characteristics of trustworthiness in a way that I would certainly echo, but we also know that during Covid many people with those characteristics were wrong, at various points. Some people were right who did not have those characteristics and I would not have normally trusted.
The crucial thing for us, and I hope it will be reflected in the way that you take things too, is about sharing questions. What is the question at hand, and how defensible is what you say or do by someone genuinely pursuing that question? Is there sincerity and is there the right domain knowledge to pursue it? But I think most of all we need to see ourselves as being on the question journey rather than looking at the answer, particularly in an unsettled area. That is what we found ourselves on.
We were looking at: are people setting up trials; are they asking for the right kind of inputs to be able to answer the questions that were facing us, such as transmission dynamics and so on, in a way that was likely to come close to the truth? We looked at that side of things. How are people questioning? How open are they to other sources of information? Are they picking up on counter-knowledge, and that kind of thing?
Q127 Chair: All of that is right, of course. You have to be asking the right questions before you get anywhere but, at the other end, there are Ministers having to make decisions about whether we make everyone wear a mask, or something like that. Hypothetically, at the time, who were you listening to saying whether you should wear a mask in public or not?
Tracey Brown: I was listening to the same sources that Ministers were listening to, but I think that there were many cases where we saw stuff starting to emerge in pockets of academic Twitter, for example. People who were specialising in the genetics and the way in which viruses mutate were picking up things that later became central stage in the discussion around variants. I think you had to listen out at the fringes as well as what was going on centrally to see what was coming down the track.
Are you asking me whether we listened to Ministers? I felt that Ministers sometimes suffered from that thing that policy does—when you make a statement, it gets sticky. That is difficult in emerging evidence because you found Ministers, one on Sky, one with BBC, and they were at odds because one was trying to give an authoritative account of the evidence emerging and the other had just been told the line and the line had changed in six hours with another study out this morning.
That is a problem when you have unfolding pictures. I think Ministers are very uncomfortable in that scenario and they are not sure also what questions to be asking themselves. There is a space that we identified early that made it very difficult to rely on words coming out of Departments.
Q128 Chair: Bob, who are you relying on?
Bob Ward: I work on climate change, so I was a member of the public when it came to Covid, but I spent a lot of time looking at the opposite end, like who you specifically should not be listening to about Covid. Many of the sources of misinformation and disinformation about Covid were the same sources as are responsible for misinformation and disinformation about climate change.
Let me make a distinction here. Misinformation is inaccurate and misleading information. Disinformation is misleading and inaccurate information that is spread specifically to deceive. In a lot of that the differentiation is on the intention of the person sharing the information.
The modes of operation and those sources of misinformation and disinformation were very similar on climate change, or identical. They went after modelling. Modelling is the thing that climate change deniers and Covid deniers hate, because they spell out potentially very adverse consequences of particular actions. These are often proxy battles. The people who are most averse to climate change policies and many of the Covid policies are those who tend to come from a libertarian viewpoint. They do not want government control over their lives, and they will use proxy battles—not talk about their fundamental values, but argue that these actions are not justified because the science is wrong.
They also had the same mode of operation of going after expert voices that they think were being influential, putting them under personal pressure and attacking them. Neil Ferguson was the primary target for that, and he suffered greatly as a result of it in the same way as many prominent climate scientists have done.
Q129 Chair: It is inevitably the case, though, that if you model—if you project into the future—what you have had, in however sophisticated way you do it, sometimes you are going to get it wrong, aren’t you? We can all vaguely remember the projections of tens of thousands of deaths from BSE, and things like that, which turned out not to be true.
Bob Ward: But that is because modelling is generally misunderstood. In modelling, you use scenarios in situations where you cannot give probabilities. You say that under these circumstances, you will get this outcome, and under these circumstances you will get other outcomes. Largely, what was happening is that the modelling was presented by the media and other sources, particularly the sources of misinformation, as if these were predictions of an inevitable outcome; whereas what they were saying was, “No policy will get you here; these policies will get you here; and these policies will get you there.” That was what they were presenting.
These sources took the scenarios in which there was no action, saying that that would be inevitable. When that did not turn out, largely because we took policies to prevent it, they said, “Oh well, they were wrong, then. The threat was exaggerated.” That is completely dishonest and disingenuous, and it does not help in the public understanding of the threats we face and the options we have for managing those risks. It happens on climate change, and it happens on Covid as well.
Q130 John Nicolson: Could I return to what you had to say earlier, Dr Smith, about the fact that you offered your services? That was completely remarkable. To summarise, you understood what the trajectory would be of infections, and you knew it was much worse than was being reported. You offered your services, I think you said, to the Chief Medical Officer of England, and your services were rejected.
Dr Smith: We alerted Patrick Vallance to our concern, as the Clinical Virology Network, that there were very few clinical virologists skilled at running laboratories and delivering virology at the coalface, with testing and so on, on the advisory panels that they were listening to and feeding into Government. The Clinical Virology Network penned a letter that was signed by many consultant virologists, my colleagues, and the reply from Patrick Vallance was, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” in not so many words.
Q131 John Nicolson: What explanation were you given?
Dr Smith: They just said, “Thank you but no thanks”. We were quite surprised.
Q132 John Nicolson: I am quite surprised. What effect do you think it would have had, had you been listened to?
Dr Smith: I should point out that this was as things had unfolded across the summer of 2020, but very early in the pandemic I pointed out to my own colleagues that we were being told who we should be testing, and we were focusing our testing on certain groups of people. I said, “This is the wrong group” because the way these diseases spread, they do not start off in people who are the elderly, the most vulnerable. Those are not very well networked people and they do not have a lot of contact. They do not get infected at high prevalence to start with. The people who do are the young people who are on the bus, the train, the plane, off to school, off to college, off to work, off on holiday. Those are the people that bring, amplify and then initiate infections and then it goes through the social strata to the less well-networked.
The people we need to focus on early on are the people on the street, the people on the Tube, the people on the train and the plane. Had we done that with more testing early, we would have seen the emergence of the amplification of the infection more acutely and we would have had probably a bit more forewarning about the likely trajectory.
I said this on BBC Radio 5 Live, and someone from what is now UKHSA phoned me up and said, “You are absolutely right because when we were doing test analyses and we were looking for negative controls for our tests, we went and got a whole bunch of samples” from the very people I was advocating for testing, and they were all positive. Initially, they thought the test was malfunctioning because these people were all positive. But it was not, it was real.
Q133 John Nicolson: To cut to the chase, if you had been listened to, presumably lives would have been saved.
Dr Smith: I do not think we can go that far. That is more of a jump. But it is certainly true—
Q134 John Nicolson: Why is that a jump? If they were doing the testing that you advocated and taking the measures that presumably would have come as a result of doing the testing, that would surely have protected people.
Dr Smith: It could have done, but we do not know what measures would have been taken as a result of us being able to say this. But we certainly would have had more knowledge and more insight more quickly, and therefore would have made more informed decisions about what we should do next.
Q135 John Nicolson: That is disturbing, it seems to me. My experience is that I was doing a radio show at the time and I was interviewing scientists. I remember one contacting me and saying that he was very disturbed by how politicians were not taking this seriously enough, because he thought that the evidence from Italy showed that there would be a steep exponential rise and that we should be going into lockdown much sooner. I remember writing about this and posting this on social media. What I got was a lot of rage from people who said that I was spreading panic. I am a journalist by profession and a history graduate. I have no scientific background, but I know how to ask questions. It seemed to me that people did not want to listen to the answers the experts were giving because it was quite scary.
That takes me on to the question that I wanted to ask you, Mr Ward. I understand that you sometimes go on GB News. Ghastly channel—I refuse ever to accept their invitations because it does not seem to me to be journalism but often very uninformed opinion. Is it wrong not to go on the channel? You must think it is right, presumably, if you go on the channel to try to tackle some of the disinformation. Is there not a danger that the counterargument is, of course, that you give it credibility by appearing?
Bob Ward: That argument has certainly been put to me many times. GB News and TalkTV are relatively new entrants in the broadcast arena, and they are reaching a specific constituency that they do not feel is being served by Sky News and BBC and other constituencies.
John Nicolson: Accuracy?
Bob Ward: They are meeting a political viewpoint that they are meeting, and those people feel—they are a small group, but they are nevertheless a group that you cannot ignore. I do not accept the argument that if you go on there and you argue with climate change deniers, you confer credibility on the deniers, because those discussions go on regardless of whether experts go on or not. If the experts all decide that they are not going on, all people get is one side of the argument.
Often it is a cover for the fact that experts are generally pretty bad in public debate. They do not learn debating skills. They are not as skilled as politicians or lawyers because they do not get it in training. They quite often go on with the attitude that being right means you win the argument. I always make the point that if you think being right means you win an argument, you have never been in a relationship. Just giving the facts simply does not work; you have to learn how to present an argument persuasively, and a lot of experts are not very good.
I go on GB News to argue with people who have a particular viewpoint, a particular agenda, and I do not want their listeners hearing only one side of the argument. I want them hearing an argument not just on reputation, because largely that does not work, but to take on the premise behind the argument.
I went on GB News just after the last UN climate change summit in November. There was a big discussion about payments to developing countries and I took it to: if we do not help developing countries deal with the impacts of climate change, the flow of displaced people in the form of refugees and asylum seekers will grow, and that is something that that constituency does care about. It means addressing their concerns and dealing head-on with the concerns that they have. That is what is required, because if you ignore that constituency, misinformation and disinformation take hold. Those people end up voting in ways that are misinformed. I think that we have seen plenty of examples of what happens when you do not do that.
Q136 John Nicolson: You use their racism to persuade them to pay attention to climate change?
Bob Ward: I would not call it racism. I just take their concerns and address them seriously.
Q137 Jane Stevenson: I wonder how the general public can find those trusted sources. Do you think people need to be better educated in how to differentiate between a trusted voice and how to critically think about when they are presented with information?
Bob Ward: I will start. It is undoubtedly the case that we can teach people to be a bit better at scrutinising information, but the problem here—I think it has been mentioned before—is that people are drowning in information. They do not want to spend all their time trying to assess claims around their decisions and they want to be able to go to trusted sources. But trust, as many people who have testified here have pointed out, is not just based on professional expertise and competence, particularly on issues where people’s identities are concerned. It is about whether you think you share the same values, whether the person who is giving you advice or information comes at this issue from the same point as you and is not trying to manipulate you in some way or has a hidden agenda. It is not always the case that experts are the best source of information because they do not always relate to the viewpoints.
I mentioned about this constituency of people who are particularly concerned about government involvement in their lives. A lot of people share that to varying extents. They want to have somebody who does not come across as having a completely different viewpoint to them. I think we can teach people. I recommend the work of Sander van der Linden. If you have a chance to ask somebody else to come and give evidence—Professor Sander van der Linden. He can come and talk to you about the principle of inoculating people against misinformation, which has been proven to be a good way of helping people critically assess the information and be able to reject misinformation. He has a new book out next month called “Foolproof”. This is an advance copy that I have through The Observer. He describes, in a very accessible way, the research he has done in this area.
Tracey Brown: The crucial thing is the critical thinking bit: how do we equip people in the little windows that exist when they ask questions and they want to pursue things further? Perhaps it is first worth saying that there are some things we can learn from Covid and there are some we cannot. For example, we cannot generalise from sending everybody home, putting them on the end of the internet and de-socialising them, because what do you think will happen? They are not just going to WhatsApp each other with “hands, face, space” all day. They are clearly going to start exploring around this whole domain and it creates a marketplace. I do not think that is that similar.
But there are places where people start opening up questions. It frustrated me a lot throughout the last couple of years that Government were very keen to go out to the fringes, and people were talking about slapping down misinformation with Facebook bans that ended up banning the British Medical Journal and Cochrane and so on, instead of looking at the near area where you have questions that are not being answered. Thousands upon thousands of people were trying to get answers from Government Departments about the reasoning, the scale of risk and how to trade one risk off through another.
We did a huge set of interviews because we could finally at scale interview the population about their experience of talking to and trying to engage with policy evidence. We found that people wanted so much more to be able to trade off. As a bus driver, do I leave a teenager on the bus stop on a rural road because she has no mask on and make her walk home without a pavement? How do I trade those risks? As somebody running a fostering agency, how do I decide whether to let the placement break, a threshold risk—that is end of placement, and change of life for child—versus not putting up a swab up their nose because she is having hysterics? Those are things that people were having to deal with. They were not just a passive audience. They were trying to implement decision-making.
There is a lot we can learn from that about how to equip people in a conversation on both sides—on the decision-maker side but also the public—thinking about what kind of information we have and how reliable it is.
I will add something on the comment by John Nicolson about going on GB News and so on. There is an overreaction to some of these areas. For example, Joe Rogan, and the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, has a lot of guests on. He had 12.8 million subscribers and something like 100 million or 200 million listeners for some of his podcasts. He had people on, who I am sure Chris got frustrated by, who were a bit maverick in their thinking, but he was taking an audience of people who were beginning to ask questions about how reliable the vaccine information is. It was not just about saying “Vaccines are rubbish”; it was not an anti-vax campaign. He was asking a lot of questions that were on a lot of people’s minds. He created an opportunity.
There is a conversation then to be had with Joe Rogan about the calibre of some of his guests and the calibre of some of his questions, but how brilliant is that, to talk to nearly 200 million people? Instead, what happened was that a group of epidemiologists in the States wrote to Spotify trying to get him banned. That said, there was a huge load of conspiracy that was so much harder for us to follow, to get our hands on and to deal with. I think it backfires when people of authority try to do that instead of talking about what is missing in the critical questioning, in the critical conversation.
Dr Smith: I think there are two issues here. One is that quite quickly the response to the pandemic became heavily politicised. This meant that commentators, unfortunately not being impartial in real life, were ending up on media platforms and allowing their politics to creep into their communication, which immediately loaded the dice and meant that people either trusted them because they agreed with their politics or disbelieved them.
One of the things I did from the outset was to try to remain impartial and explain why there are differing opinions and why each side thinks what they do, and therefore what the current course of action was based upon, which meant that I tried to avoid doing that.
The other element that I think is a problem here and will be a problem in many areas—climate change is one of them—is that social media and the internet has been an amazing thing and it has transformed the world, but it has also broken all the existing models that meant there was good curating of information, responsible reporting and editorial practices. It basically hands a megaphone to anybody.
The way the algorithms are created on Twitter for example—let’s use Twitter, but Twitter is not the only example—is that they will find people who agree with you. If you say something, it will go and find a bunch of people who say the same thing as you and it makes you friends with them. Even if you previously had nobody listening to a thing you said and no one would have believed you, suddenly you are introduced to enormous numbers of people who appear to share your opinion, which enforces your self-belief, reinforces their self-belief, and amplifies the message because friends have friends and everyone spreads this information, including the disinformation.
This is one of the ways in which there was a catalyst for the transmission of disinformation. I was cancelled more times than I have had hot dinners during Covid on Twitter and things like that because I was saying unpopular things, in the sense I was telling these people who did not want to believe what we were saying what the facts were. On one occasion, I went and had my Pfizer vaccine, and I published the “Here is the information leaflet, just had my Pfizer vaccine” on social media. Someone sent me back the circuit diagram for the microchips that were in the vaccine that I had just received, and that Bill Gates was now using to control me. I looked at the circuit diagram and I thought, “This is quite intriguing,” because it did not look like any microchip circuit diagram I had ever seen. I went and looked it up, and it was the wow pedal for a guitar. So, yes, I did go “wow,” but not for the reason that the individuals were doing. But it was being proliferated all over the internet that these are the microchips.
Anyone who does not have the intelligence or the necessary background education to pick that apart and see it for what it is would have been potentially seduced by that piece of disinformation. They could have been misled and potentially put off from getting vaccinated or urging others to do likewise.
Q138 Jane Stevenson: There were some interesting things in all of those responses. I am not a scientist—I stopped science at 16—but when something is so complicated, such as Covid or climate change, how do we try to get credible information presented in a way that people can understand? I think your point about wanting to receive information from people you identify with and you see similarities with is also important, but does this mean that schools should be teaching us all that we have these political viewpoints or biases within ourselves that we have to examine when we are looking for information sources? Does this go back to education and how we reassess? Who do we need to present the information in those ways, or is it many people at the same time?
Bob Ward: I think that Tracey mentioned the importance of teaching critical thinking. Everybody from an early age should be taught how to evaluate information. The assumption is often made that we are talking about science. We are not talking about science. We are talking about being able to evaluate and assess any kind of information, but there are certain issues that are so complex. You do not want to have to work out from basics the greenhouse effect all the way up to climate change impacts. That is not what you want to do with your life, unless you are a climate researcher, so you want to go to trusted sources of information.
The media is a part of the problem here, in the sense that it is not taking its responsibilities seriously enough. We have a broken regulatory system that parliamentarians gave up on and we now have a shambolic self-regulatory system that allows newspapers and broadcasters to convey to the public misleading and inaccurate information that is damaging their lives demonstrably.
Q139 Jane Stevenson: There is an issue though with that. The point that Tracey made that Government or regulators start to get involved, it fuels the conspiracy and it is all being controlled from—
Bob Ward: There is always a balance to be achieved, but it was Voltaire who first said, “With great power comes great responsibility”. If you can reach large audiences, you should bear a greater responsibility to behave in a way that is responsible. We are reaching a point in the UK where we are slipping down the route that the US is where free speech is seen as trumping all other cases. The right of somebody to make inaccurate and misleading comments, even though they can cause demonstrable harm, is seen as being sacrosanct. Any kind of regulatory standards, any attempt to clamp down on it, is somehow a grand offence against free speech. We have to achieve a balance here where people have a right to receive information that is accurate and gives them the ability to make well-informed decisions. That particularly applies to those in which people have some degree of trust.
The trouble at the moment with newspapers is that there is an assumption that journalistic standards apply to all content in newspapers. In a lot of newspapers their opinion columns are outright misinformation; they are not fact-checked. Last week The Times published an article by Matt Ridley about Thor the walrus, and it contained a lot of misinformation. It claimed that sea ice is not reducing in the Arctic, said walruses are thriving and said that David Attenborough has been lying to audiences about the effect to walruses. When I contacted the newspaper, they did not want to know. They said, “You can send in a letter”—a small little letter that they put in a letters page. But that article was shared widely on social media because it confers authority: “It has been in The Times, so it must be accurate”.
This is where you get this cycle of the traditional media and social media leading to the spreading of misinformation. That is just last week. It happens every day, every week, all throughout the year, and we are not getting better at handling it. It is not easy to weigh up those trade-offs, but I do not think we have the balance right at the moment.
Q140 Jane Stevenson: Tracey, do you think that is the road to mass censorship?
Tracey Brown: Yes, I am a bit concerned about not slipping between standards and regulation, or bans. I am finding that I would much rather have misinformation out there than have Facebook arbitrating what is science. I find that a much more dangerous path to tread for the future. We saw that go wrong. I think it is quite worrying, because that also brings into play their litigation avoidance activity, their commercial concerns and everything else. It is very unaccountable, unlike standards where we have accountability. If we have a good regulator of those standards, you have an appeal and an ombudsman and all that.
What Bob is describing, though, is that even if we had a good press complaints process that everybody subscribed to, a lot of discussion is going on away from that arena anyway. We have to ask ourselves: where is the opportunity? Government did not do much in social media throughout the pandemic. The government channels are not very active, other than the specific agencies such as ONS, for example, but social media is not that thing. What would it take to communicate the work of government through social media and then be involved in all the conversations? It is not realistic. It is not realistic for any of us to be chasing all of that, but I think we have to ask where the opportunity is because sometimes there just is no opportunity to talk to people in the way that you want to.
There were a lot of working-class people who looked at middle-class professionals during the pandemic—and they do sometimes around other environmental issues—and thought, “Yes, you have a garden; you have tenure; you have a nice life; you walk your dog. I live in a two-bedroom flat with three kids, so what is good for you is not what is good for me.” While they might have pulled a load of BS off the internet to prove the point and you might want to dismantle that, fundamentally they are not wrong. They are not in the same position, and the policies are landing differently for them. You can load up all the information you want and put it into the trusted sources, but at the end of the day that fundamental opportunity is not there. When it is there, when people are looking, we need to be sure that we are equipping them.
It may start with some education, but I think also when people are questioning, we can take those questions and show them that it is important to apply them to all sources of information; whether it is a politician’s statement or David Icke on the internet, you need to be applying those same critical questions.
Chair: Can we pause for a second? I know Julie has a question she specifically wants to ask Dr Smith, who has to go.
Q141 Julie Elliott: I will be quick. I want to go back to Covid. At the moment I am getting a lot of correspondence from people who are saying—and this is because of what is on social media—Covid now, more infection builds up resistance and so on. On the other side, a lot of authoritative sources are saying T cells and compromised immune systems, so we are heading for disaster. How do we know what to believe?
Dr Smith: History can help us here, because if you look back in history, there are 6 million years of evolution of humans and about 8 billion of us on the planet. If we were that easy to wipe out, it would have happened not once, not twice, but many times, and it hasn’t. We are pretty resilient as a species. We have had run-ins with a range of different infectious diseases many times in the past, obviously flu most commonly, but we have had it with the coronavirus, which caused a pandemic in the past. That was the virus called OC43, which used to be called bovine coronavirus. Back in the 1890s there was an outbreak that we thought was flu—in fact, it was called the Russian flu—and subsequent analysis has suggested that what happened is exactly as happened in the modern era, where high population density and interactions with wild animals and farmed animals caused the jump of an infection carried by one species into another. That was OC43, as we now call it, but it was bovine, a cow coronavirus.
It spread like wildfire through the human population once it got into the human population, because we had never seen the like of it before. No one had any immunity, everyone was susceptible, masses of people were infected all at once, which caused massive impact, massive morbidity, massive mortality, but then over subsequent years from the 1890s it settled down. I guarantee if I go and test 100 people off the streets out there, I will find probably five or 10 of them with it today and they will have the symptoms of the common cold.
What happens is that these things start off as a dramatic splash in the water and the ripples slowly subside as we become better bedfellows with the virus and the virus becomes better bedfellows with us. We adapt to it, it adapts to us, so there is a change on both sides, but critically most people catch it multiple times in their lifetime. By the time they are old and vulnerable, they have had it so many times that their immune system is very well adapted to fend it off, so it doesn’t cause serious illness.
The situation with Covid right now is that we are slowly getting to the point where everyone’s immune system thinks they have spent their lifetime catching it, which hitherto they had not, of course; they were all naive to it. The people who are most vulnerable, at the extremes of age or ill health, would have had a more serious run-in with it. We know that for sure. Younger people would have caught it, and that is why when we look at who is at most risk, young people had almost no symptoms, if any, whereas older people were more dramatically impacted.
What catching it did—and prior to that, what the vaccines did—was to fool our immune systems into thinking we had spent our lifetimes catching it. It has adapted, we have adapted and we are now in a position where it is causing a common cold-type manifestation across most of the world, except in China, where people haven’t spent the last three years catching it. Unlike this country, where about 90% of the country has had it more than once, no one really has had it in China. Now they are all getting it, so it is there like it was here three years ago. Is that okay?
Julie Elliott: Yes, thank you.
Dr Smith: I am sorry to rush, but I have to go and talk to Jeremy Vine’s programme on Radio 2, which is a prior engagement and I don’t want to let them down, so thank you very much for having me.
Chair: I appreciate that. Thank you for coming.
Q142 Jane Stevenson: Thank you, Dr Chris, for your intervention. Going back to a previous panel, do you think there should be more spaces on the internet where people can see both sides clearly without a conclusion being drawn? Do you think we have websites that do that?
Tracey Brown: There are some. As with trust and trustworthiness and all of these things, I am nervous of making too much of any particular feature because fashions move. While on the one hand, as Bob said, people listen to people like them—and I find that too—what they also sometimes love is a nerd. In fact, when we surveyed the whole population with NatCen to find out what people’s experience of information had been during the pandemic, 69% of people, as the highest, said they wanted government information in the form of expert summaries or statements. Sometimes someone who earnestly loves their subject, who can be very different from you, is what you want to see.
If you go down the road of saying, “Here is the question, here is our best guess at answering it and this how we have gone about answering it” and maybe the limitations of answering—why we can’t, just like that, say how you cure cancer or how much ventilation for preventing transmission—you might describe the difficulties in answering that question or how other people have come to conclusions for various reasons, that is the best conversation to be having.
Q143 Jane Stevenson: Do you think politicians are very reluctant to say, “We don’t have a solid answer. This is our best guess between this, this and this”?
Tracey Brown: If we are talking about the pandemic, I think they were split. Things like this go back to the difficulty of not having a clear picture and saying that we don’t know. As I said earlier, even if you think you are doing that, once you have made a statement on the radio about it, it then becomes quite hard to reel back from that. Some of these difficulties—I can remember when we had debates around the evidence for train braking systems. I remember John Prescott trying to navigate these discussions in public and feeling nervous that we had evidence emerging and we had to change the position. It is hard, but I would say that politicians went down either an authoritative route or an authoritarian route, depending perhaps on what they felt most comfortable with. I strongly feel that over the longer term the authoritative route was better. It prepared people for change and said that tomorrow we might be saying something different.
Q144 Jane Stevenson: It is very difficult how politicians have to be authoritative and people want answers and reassurance, but when the science—there are so many questions. I had a surgery with one of my constituents who was genuinely obviously very anxious about chemtrails and presented me with lots of evidence that she had found on the internet. Once someone is in that state of genuine anxiety, how do we bring people back from that with evidence on something, where they are so convinced that this is the reality and there is this huge authoritarian cover-up against them?
Tracey Brown: Can I add a small thing? We deal a lot with those sorts of issues. The concern will often come to you in this form, “Have you seen this? Have you seen this evidence? It is missing. Don’t you know it is there?” That is perhaps the most extreme end of it, but I do think government, if we are talking about agencies and others, could do a lot more to show what they are looking at, to go back to the previous point about the difficulty of it. Lots of people who were not extreme in that way contacted us throughout the pandemic, organisations of hauliers, for example, and others saying, “Do you think government knows about this? Do you think they know how we exchange at the border crossing?” People felt like they were not sure what government were looking at.
I think showing, “This is what we have. This is what we are basing this on”, what we would call the transparency of evidence, is an important thing because it enables people to see it. Obviously somebody like the constituent you mentioned is not going to be happy until you base it on the website that she has been getting it all from, but a bit more openness about those sources and, “Yes, we have seen this, but it is not yet something we can act upon because it doesn’t meet our evidence threshold”—a bit like taking what the Libraries do and applying it more widely, perhaps. It is, “Yes, we know that exists, that source. It may have something to it, but it is not meeting our evidence threshold at this point, and this is why.”
That would be perhaps the best way to go in that. You acknowledge the existence of something, and you are not just banning or pushing it or pretending it is not there in the way that people often believe people in authority are doing, but this is why it is not part of your calculation.
Q145 Jane Stevenson: Do we have any idea, pre-internet, if it is a similar number of people who believe—
Tracey Brown: Chemtrails is pre-internet, for sure. My first green ink letter was chemtrails at Sense about Science 20 years ago.
Q146 Jane Stevenson: On general things, has there always been a section of society that functions in the same way, but with the internet we just know about that now?
Tracey Brown: Yes.
Bob Ward: Sander van der Linden and his colleagues have evidence that shows that it is probably the same proportion of the population. It is a very small proportion who are susceptible to conspiracy theories, that somehow there is something going on in the background, somebody manipulating it. The internet has done two things. First of all, you can access information from all around the world very quickly, those who have information can spread it very quickly, and also you can cut yourself off from voices that might be giving a counterargument. Dr Smith described this concept of the bubble or an echo chamber, where essentially you just hear voices that are reflecting to you information that is similar to what you are hearing and it stops you from hearing from other voices. Indeed, in some of the social media, the algorithms are designed to then automatically feed to you not just the same material but material that becomes more and more extreme, so you get into this spiral of it ever more increasing.
I don’t accept that it should be a free-for-all and you just have to make people more critical thinkers. I do not think that will work. You have to have consequences for those who have the greatest power here to spread information, but I think for MPs there is a good way of leading by example, of not just explaining what you think is the right answer but how you came to that conclusion. That would also expose MPs to risks where the conclusion is, “Because the leader said that this is our position” and so on, but if you were able to give an explanation of why you have reached your conclusions, that would give people greater confidence and would help provide guidance to constituents that, “This is the way I go about assessing these claims” and hopefully people will copy that.
Jane Stevenson: Very interesting, thank you.
Q147 Julie Elliott: Good afternoon. Bob, I want to go back to something you said before. There were many of us in this place who argued very heavily for Leveson 2. It wasn’t all politicians who let it go and did not see the implementation of what would have stopped that Matt Ridley article, quite frankly.
What could Government do to help the public find authoritative information, bearing in mind that the level of distrust in Government is such that often when Governments endorse something, the public instantly think that it is a bad thing? What could Government do to help the public find this authoritative information?
Tracey Brown: Publish what they are using themselves. We have done three independent reviews of Government Departments looking at the transparency of the evidence on which policy is built. There was improvement until Covid happened and then we had this kind of retrenchment, unfortunately. Departments are, to varying degrees, good at doing it or not. That is very helpful, because as I mentioned earlier, society is not made up of a mass of individuals passively consuming media or communications of any sort. There are many intermediaries and there are many people who I would call perhaps implementers, who have to take what is said or directed and communicate to their employees, to their customers and so on. What you want to do is make sure that those people are able to talk confidently about the information.
I found myself, at Sense about Science, wanting to push back on certain things but being a bit unsure about whether Government did have that information and had disregarded it or whether they had not looked at that information. Often over the years, whether it is on drug policy or any other area, the first question when people approach Sense about Science would be, “We are worried about whether the evidence is being used here.” They want to know what is being looked at, and we don’t know. That would be a real big help. It would give us confidence to say, “Yes, I really think this has been a very sound piece of research. This is something based on a very good review.” You can’t do that if it is not published. I think that is cutting your nose off, not to spite your face but cutting your nose off.
Why would you be worrying about someone who is already quite hostile and out here? They are not going to engage in government communications when your near crowd and those people who are talking to someone out on the fringes away, who are disengaged, can’t make sense of what the decision is. Do you see what I mean? I feel like we are missing the very obvious bit, the open goal, in pursuit of something that is much more elusive and very unlikely to ever be tackled.
Q148 Julie Elliott: Tracey, in your written evidence you said that it was important to differentiate between an expert voice and the expert as a guide to evidence. Could you expand on that and explain what you mean, because I am a little confused by that?
Tracey Brown: I think Chris began to touch on it before he left, which was that quite a number of people who are experts also became advocates for particular policies that they thought should be implemented. It became very strong in the pandemic; it has happened elsewhere. That is challenging because what you have there is that experts sometimes almost mistake their own tendentious outlook for an evidence-based outlook; they mix the two things up together or they don’t see that they are not stepping back and asking a bigger question. My worry is that if you come out with recommendations that talk about expert voices, that is very easily understood as experts’ world views. I think there is something for the academies to do in guiding the media, politicians or the wider public as to what domains of expertise are relevant to particular questions and being guides on that journey.
What should be the questions? If you talk to SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, one of the problems for it was that questions that were set to it during Covid, and at other times too, were not necessarily set by people who know how best to set the questions. Modelling during the pandemic, for example, was, “How do we reduce transmission?” because that was the question as set. The question was not, “How do we optimise both children’s development and transmission reduction? Is there a sweet spot where we get the maximum transmission reduction at the least amount of damage to children’s education?” No one asked that question, so modellers did not model it.
I think that guidance could come from the academies in expertise, as I say, to politicians but also to the wider public. They could say, “This is how we would set up a test for this. This is the question that should be asked. This is the domain knowledge you need.” I think that is what has been revealed by the pandemic as a gap. I chaired a meeting of all of the European academies to look at lessons before Christmas and all of them said that the pandemic had taught them that they didn’t know their own experts. They had to learn very quickly. Chris has said virologists got frustrated. They weren’t the only ones; engineers did too. It became quickly clear that the academies did not have a fast line to find that out and figure it out and then transmit that into the public domain. I think that there is work to be done there on navigation.
Q149 Chair: Is it a speed issue? The academies are used to working at a sort of academic pace, and when you have a public health crisis, or indeed if there was an emergency in the wider environmental scheme, they are just not geared up to do it.
Tracey Brown: Yes. It is a speed issue, and it is also how to be prepared to respond at speed, isn’t it? If you already understand a bit about your membership, a bit more about the major areas that might emerge as significant policy concerns and what the groups are—as it happens, I know that Bob set up groups like this when he was at the Royal Society—it is that, the need to get at them quickly. Of course, where the academies might just about get by with two or three media inquiries, they can call on their favourite fellows who are always available and know how to do media. Suddenly, with a pandemic, that wasn’t good enough and a lot more was needed. You had to lose those people on to big committees and so on. I think that meeting a big demand like that is something that they are now thinking about how to do.
Q150 Chair: Bob, you have experience, don’t you?
Bob Ward: Yes. I used to work at the Royal Society between 1999 and 2006 in its policy and communications department. It has responded to policymakers. I was there during the foot and mouth disease crisis. The Royal Society carried out a review afterwards of how it had been handled. The academies are mainly representatives of people who are employed in universities and in government and elsewhere, so they are not there just to drop everything and spend all their time responding to this request from Government and so on. They do their best. If you wanted to recommend a big increase in their grant in aid so that they could do more, and more quickly, I am sure that they would welcome it.
Do we have the set-up to provide the advice to Government? I think there have been lots of opportunities to improve that, but I find that the issue is that the public want to go and talk to somebody about their concerns. Maybe they have read something on the internet, and they want to go and talk to somebody they trust and say, “Look, I have read this. What do you think?” and they want to get an authoritative opinion. They do have that to some extent on health issues. They can go and talk to a GP. GPs usually rate very highly in the annual trust in professions survey that Ipsos MORI does. I am afraid politicians and journalists rate at the bottom. Although individual politicians and journalists are trusted very highly by individuals, as a profession they don’t do so well.
It is mostly that access. In the absence of being able to go and talk directly to somebody and look them in the eye and have that conversation, they go to these other sources—maybe the internet, maybe a friend who kind of engages in conspiracy theories but is very happy to talk about these issues. We will have to create more of an opportunity for the public to engage directly with the professions. The academies have a role to play. I am afraid at the moment they don’t have the appetite to wade in, partly because if you are an academic and you wade into a contentious debate, you will become a target. You get hate mail and you get all sorts of abuse.
I am sure that as MPs you will know a bit about that yourselves. It is not pleasant being in that, and most academics think, “Well, that is not really what I signed up for. That is not my job.” We need more people who are willing to go to the coalface, have those arguments, engage with the sceptics and talk to the public. That is where we need to focus, because our current set-up, where we are relying on too many gatekeepers who are making bad decisions or the wrong decisions, isn’t serving our purposes.
You gave the example of the 6 January insurrection in the United States; we have seen it in Brazil. Hand on heart, could we say that that could never happen here in the UK? I would not be confident in saying we would never have that happen here, so better that we learn from the dangers that others have experienced and act pre-emptively rather than wait until it gets as bad and then go, “Oh dear, we should have done something”.
Q151 Chair: I should say, though, that on the idea that GPs should be used as gatekeepers to reassure people about general policy issues, every GP listening will be absolutely horrified.
Bob Ward: No, I don’t mean that, but that is an example where people can go and talk directly to an expert. They have access to an expert to go and talk about an issue around health, but on many issues they don’t have somebody they can go and talk to directly.
Q152 Kevin Brennan: I was quite interested, Tracey, in something you said at the outset, when you said that being trusted and being right are not the same thing. Of course, in our game the people are always right, even when they are wrong. That is the waters that we swim in in a democratic system. I was interested when you said that. Who are you referring to? Who is trusted but is not always right?
Tracey Brown: I think there have been a number of cases over the years where the more trusted in a debate, such as an environmental organisation, has made a mistake.
Q153 Kevin Brennan: Could you give us an example? Our inquiry is about trusted voices, and that is a very interesting insight you gave. Maybe we should be reflecting in our report that insight of yours, if we can give examples of it.
Tracey Brown: The pandemic is probably the best example, because we all have one of those. We all have at least one part in the pandemic where we were wrong. I would challenge anyone to say that they had it right. Transmission dynamics, for example, the fact that it was aerosol transmission. We had loads of scientists, MPs, Ministers and officials on public record saying that it was fomite transmission, hand-to-hand transmission, and in fact it turned out to be aerosol transmission.
Q154 Kevin Brennan: Yes, and the facts sometimes in these instances are not black and white, because you had scientists saying, “Well, maybe that isn’t a particularly effective policy intervention” and then you would have other advisers to Government, behavioural scientists, saying, “Yes, but if you say that people will lose trust in the Government because you told them something different yesterday”. It is very easy to say politicians should not be going out there and giving messages of this kind, but it is when they are being advised different things by scientists as to the impact. Maybe the kid gets left at the cold bus stop because a behavioural scientist says, “If you do not put out a hard message on masks, people will not follow that protocol and more people will get sick”.
Tracey Brown: Yes. There were differences, and I think there were big differences in the behavioural science views that were in play, but there is a key point here. There is a belief when there is urgency that somehow we can do away with all those things like having a conversation about the evidence and what we know and so on and just issue simple slogans. The window in which it is possible to do that is very short.
Q155 Kevin Brennan: Did it take too long for the scientists to get that message out there, when the emerging evidence, it seemed to me, was pretty powerful about the aerosol transmission? There was lots of evidence from around the world about it, particularly from the Far East, yet we were still banging on—because of advice—about handwashing protocols and about those sorts of things, rather than saying, “Indoors with other people, that is the real issue”.
Tracey Brown: Yes. Even the most slow to catch on could not have failed to see that by October 2020. It was March 2021 where we finally got “Hands, face, space” and sort of, “Open the windows”. I think there was a belief that having put out a slogan like, “Hands, face, space” and spent a bit of marketing on doing that, it was better to just stick to it. That needs to be looked at. It may have been informed by the fact that there was a No. 10 communications team that had just been through Brexit and then a leadership election and then an election, so it may be that there was a more campaigny kind of—
Q156 Kevin Brennan: Maybe, but I do not think you are right to let scientists off the hook here, because I am not here to defend the Government. I am an Opposition MP and I think lots of things they did were lamentable during Covid, obviously. The bottom line is I think the main reason for it is not purely the comms people, it is what they were being told by behavioural scientists, “You will get the public confused if you do this”.
Tracey Brown: Speaking very frankly, Kevin, I think that scientists lack the leadership skills of politicians and they don’t want to be in that leadership position, especially in times of national crisis. For all that scientists might be smarter on these subjects and have the best advice, I do not think they have the same leadership skills. That is what was required. To push through on that at a time where you are basically saying to people, “This is what you have to do”, to push against your colleagues, who might be advising differently and so on, took quite a lot. We have some very strong advisers in the UK who did try to push things. They probably would be the first to admit that they could have done better in some areas than they did. Their attention was pulled all over the place. Transmission was not the only thing under discussion. That is quite well documented through the health and science committees having tracked them almost in real time as they were doing it.
Q157 Kevin Brennan: Yes, that is interesting. It is a good point that Bob Ward was making about the fact that politicians are not high on the trust index as a tribe but, interestingly, people are for and against things in general but not in particular. When it comes to politicians, if you ask the public about their local MP, you get a different answer than when you ask them the same question about politicians.
While we are not as a tribe trusted voices, the reality is that taking decisions in Government is not often a black-and-white thing between doing what is right and what is wrong. It is often between doing what is unpalatable and what is unacceptable. That is the reality of most decision-making at the sharp end of politics. Those of us who have been Government Ministers will tell you that is the reality of it. I suppose it is a lazy tendency to say that it is all politicians’ fault because they do not tell the truth to the public but, in defence of the profession of politics, that is because we have to do the hard bit. Experts should not just jump off the hook and blame the politicians. That is what I am saying.
Tracey Brown: There is a lazy tendency, back the other way, about the public to take the worst part of your postbag or the stuff that people put on the internet against an academic and picture that as the view of the public. Most people do not have any skin in the game on most issues to do with science, evidence and policy. They are quite willing, if they think you are earnest and sincere in what you are trying to do, to fathom something out and to take a good decision. They are willing to hear. They know decisions in life do not come easy. You have to trade off difficult sets of interests and one person’s health against another sometimes. They know about costs and all that stuff. We sometimes are at risk of thinking also that the public hate everybody when they are open to a good bit of reasoning.
Q158 Kevin Brennan: Yes, we know that is not true because this is a process we go through all the time. My advice to scientists faced with that would be to listen but not just to those who shout the loudest. That is probably the best advice you could give.
Bob, I will put a question to you as well because I am conscious of time and I do not want to hog it too much, but by all means come back on that as well. You gave a defence when John Nicolson asked you about appearing on GB News and TalkTV and so on. Then later on you indicated you thought that they were not regulated properly by Ofcom for broadcast news and that they do not adhere to the Ofcom regulations. How do you feel about the fact that TalkTV now seems to have appeared high up on the electronic programming guide on Freeview by taking over the local TV slot on Channel 7 or 8 or somewhere high up on the index, which will give it the prominence usually reserved for trusted, public service broadcasting news?
Bob Ward: I would not say going on GB News and TalkTV is the favourite part of my job, but I do it because it is an important part of it.
With the media—and indeed the last session brought this out as well—the obsession with impartiality as somehow the main standard to meet is separate from the issue of accuracy. You can be impartial and completely inaccurate by saying, “These guys are saying the earth is warming. These guys are saying the earth is not warming. I do not want to take sides. I want to be impartial and so I say the evidence is inconclusive.”
We have to have a much stronger focus on accuracy and a willingness to accept that we make decisions quite often—and Covid was a good example—with incomplete information. As you acquire more information, you realise your conclusion initially was wrong. We have to create an environment where it is easier to say, “The facts have changed. They are different now from before and so we need to change our minds. We need to reverse our policy.” We are creating a mad culture—and the newspapers are worst at this—where somehow a Government U-turn is in itself, by being a U-turn, a bad thing, even if they have corrected and have now introduced a policy that is better. We have to make a culture where it is possible to acknowledge that we make decisions in the absence of full information and then, when full information arises, we make a better decision and be open to that. In fact, we should celebrate it.
The public trust people more who are willing to admit mistakes. They do not trust a politician coming on and saying, “We are sticking with this policy even though patently the facts are completely different now and they do not support what we are doing”. That kind of thing erodes trust, and it is understandable.
Q159 Kevin Brennan: You will never persuade Opposition politicians not to attack the Government over U-turns but, anyway, we are in a competitive environment as well, not a collaborative one.
Bob Ward: Yes, but criticising them for making a wrong decision in the past is different from saying, “You should not have changed course”. If we give the public the false impression that politicians should always make the right decision, even in the absence of reliable information, that is a standard that cannot possibly be met and it creates an unrealistic expectation that is not helpful for democracy.
Kevin Brennan: I will take this moment to welcome the fact that the Government U-turned on Channel 4 privatisation, which this Committee has looked into.
Tracey Brown: We have the numbers if you would like them. On the eve of Evidence Week in Parliament this year, we did a survey with Ipsos of the public and also compared it with MPs’ responses to a similar survey. Some 42% of the public said that they trust politicians’ statements more if they change their views in light of evidence, whereas among MPs 20% think that the public trust them less if they change their minds. That is 20% who think there are benefits to doing it. In other words, the public are more likely to trust you if you change your mind in light of evidence. That is nearly half. That is quite impressive.
Q160 Kevin Brennan: I will finish by asking Bob about TalkTV. Would you agree that Ofcom ought to look into the fact that it has suddenly somehow acquired that prominent position on the electronic programming guide, which is supposed to be there for local television? That is why they were given that spot, which is much coveted in the media world.
Bob Ward: The trouble is that Ofcom—and indeed the past self-regulation—only responds to complaints. Believe me; the complaints process, if you have ever been through it, takes a lot of time and effort. It takes months and months. We have to create a greater appreciation that you can promote a political viewpoint that is different from others, but changing the facts to fit your argument cannot be acceptable.
Q161 Kevin Brennan: You can have your own opinions but not your own facts, basically?
Bob Ward: Indeed.
Chair: Thank you, Kevin. That is the famous Keynes question of, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” That should be engraved on every politician somewhere.
Q162 Dr Rupa Huq: It has been epic. I know you said that you are not a Covid person, but Covid was a step change when previously the other big defining thing I have had in my political life was Brexit, when we had had enough of experts. Suddenly, with Covid, every politician had to be legitimised and flanked by scientists at the podium. Even before that were the 2011 riots when the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said, “We do not want sociological explanation. We want condemnation.” Before, academics were not trusted and now they are.
Tracey Brown: Maybe in scale that is the case. It has been a longer time coming that politicians have, on some tricky issues of the applications of science, wanted—this is an unpleasant way to say it—to hide behind the scientists or have the scientists pushed to the fore, like GMOs, for example. We would rather have a science committee sort this out and then run the gauntlet in the public debate than have to do this ourselves. It is only recently that the Government have come out and had conversations with the public about that issue. I saw it in illegal drugs and in the disposal of nuclear waste. We have legacy waste in this country from British nuclear fuels. Again, it is about trying always to hope that the geologists would solve that one—we don’t want to have that public conversation.
There has always been a desire to take what is ultimately a political contest and hope that somehow the science will settle it. We have never seen something on such a scale. A bit of that happened during Covid when there was, “The scientists will give us the answers and we will immediately know what to do”.
We take out of that into the future now a hope and the opportunity to have a better understanding of the rightful place of both. One of the concerns I have is that being evidence-led in the wider public domain is synonymous now with the scientists being in hock with the politicians. I get a lot of suspicion of that among the groups that we work with that are less amenable to an evidence-based approach.
We need to establish that there are questions that mostly have a mix of policy and a testable element. For example, if I say that Brighton should host the Olympics because it is prestigious for the city, that is a value statement. You cannot test it. If I say it will increase the number of children doing sport and reduce childhood obesity, that is a testable question. Most policies are a mix of those two things. You bring the scientists in on the testable questions and then you have the leadership of politicians when you explain how you have reasoned those through. The reasoning is also important.
We saw in Covid, as we saw previously for about 20 years, a bit of a tussle between those two things and not clarity about each playing their part. I would love to see that being the legacy of Covid, having done that at scale so much, having the two parts in the discussion.
Bob Ward: It is not just scientists. I commend to you an article that Paul Johnson, the head of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, wrote after the Brexit vote, talking about what a terrible service the economists had done to the public during the debate when they simply had not engaged with a lot of the public concerns.
A lot of this is about framing. Experts can seem aloof and distant and disconnected from what drives people’s concerns and give a technical answer that does not appear to relate to people’s circumstances. I come back again to that example. If you have a distant expert who does not relate to people’s own circumstances, the information they give, while being accurate, does not answer the question and can be frustrating for the public, particularly if it is proxy concerns.
Covid was a big crisis on people who all had a different range of political views. It is not a surprise that their political views therefore coloured the way in which they interpreted the advice, the information and the policies they were receiving. As we have said, at one end of the spectrum, those who tend towards a libertarian point of view are the ones who were most strongly against mask mandates and vaccinations because they saw it as overreach. It was not that they had specific insights on the evidence about masks or about vaccinations, but it became a proxy argument about how reliable this information is. Actually, they were concerned about, “Look, I don’t care how much this is a risk. I don’t want the Government telling me what to do in my daily life.” We should have that conversation, not these proxy arguments over whether the information about masks is reliable or not, because that is not the issue that was driving the concern.
Q163 Dr Rupa Huq: Are pure scientists more trusted voices than social scientists? As you said, you can get 15 different economists and they can all say different things with no objectivity.
Bob Ward: The Ipsos MORI poll does not ask about social scientists. They are not even in the running. If you said to somebody, “I am a social scientist”, they would not know what you meant by it. Scientists recognise that they have a problem. Social scientists have not even realised that they have a problem yet. They need to do a better job.
The respect for economics as an evidence-based profession is zero. Most economists do not even know the origin of the accusation that it is a dismal science, which came about when Thomas Carlyle attacked a group of economists who said that there was no economic basis for slavery. Economists should wear that label with pride, and yet most of them think it refers to the fact that their models are not good and they are not good at doing that. All of these professions have to take their jobs more seriously, particularly their engagement with the public, explaining the basis of the decision-making, being open about uncertainties and being willing to acknowledge when mistakes are made because the information was incomplete or new, surprising information has emerged.
Q164 Dr Rupa Huq: Do we need more training courses to make these academic people better equipped to communicate to the public?
Bob Ward: Yes, and not just about communicating, “Tell us about your research, Professor”, but debate training. Most of the scientists I know do not join university debate clubs. As I said, they go into an argument and they say, “Go and look at the peer-reviewed evidence” when talking to a public audience. The public will not do that. They have to be better at presenting the argument. A classic technique that stops almost every scientist right at the start of it is, “How certain are you, Professor, in your findings?” Almost no scientist is willing to say they are 100% certain about anything. It immediately undermines them. They go down into this rabbit hole of talking about the nature of uncertainty. They should be saying, “We are not certain, but this is risk management. We are not certain about any of this, but it is about the weight of risk.”
Almost everything we are talking about here is a conversation about risk, as Tracey mentioned, and we have to have a better framing and experts have to be better at switching the conversation over. Bad-faith actors who want to stop a particular action because they do not want government interference will use these techniques to derail the argument and stop a sensible and informed decision-making process.
Tracey Brown: There is quite a lot of material now from those of us with experience in the more fractious part of these discussions that we share. On certainty, for example, it is not that you have to send people away on a six-week course or whatever. It is quite basic stuff. There are lines that you say to somebody, “The fact that we do not know everything does not mean that anything could be true. The fact that we have not cured cancer yet does not mean that you can flush your lymph nodes with this magical potion.” Similarly, with uncertainty, sometimes I find saying to people, “Newton’s physics was not the whole story. We did not have Einstein then, but it was enough to get a man on the moon.” When people think, “My goodness, you can make a calculation and a decision and an action as big as that, based on not the full picture”, it is helpful to make them stop.
We have loads of easy ways to talk about difficult or complex issues. Many scientists now have that experience. Bob is right, though. It is not there in the social scientists, who tend to think that because they are doing work about society, that covers it. They do not think about whether they can talk about that work in a social way.
There is also a gap in people—including Committees in this place—understanding how much evidence was coming in from other places. I am going to a discussion this afternoon about the fact that the Treasury published none of its models during the whole of the pandemic. SAGE is rather aggrieved that it was crawled all over and every word it said was scrutinised and no one said, “Hang on. Where is the economic modelling that is clearly going on but no one is looking at, either?” A lot of advice does come into the Government in different ways that people are not being self-conscious about and thinking about having a conversation about that.
Q165 Dr Rupa Huq: I know you have been critical of Gov.UK throughout Covid. Is that one of your reasons? What problems did you have with that?
Tracey Brown: Yes, and before, but from both sides. I know that there are many good people in the Government and many officials. People work in the Government because they have a sense of public service, and they want to provide people with the best pathway to information. It is difficult for them to do that. Gov.UK has for some time now been structured as though people’s engagement with the Government is all about getting a passport or a driving licence, and not about people who want to engage in the work and outputs of Government Departments and how policies are made. We know that there is a big audience for that, and Gov.UK is not structured in a way that enables Departments to share that information in that way.
It is difficult to navigate. Even people working in Departments use Google to find stuff because they cannot find it on their own system. It archives lots of important information and reports backing policy that the Government have done over the years in such a way that, again, unless it is on Google, you cannot find it. For example, the Ministry of Justice has done a review of youth justice in the past that probably rivals anything ever done in academia. Can you find it? Not on a Government website, you can’t. All the newly appointed officials and newly appointed Ministers at Justice then think that there is not a piece of work on the future of youth justice and it is waiting to be done, unless they happen to have been part of that debate 15 years ago.
A lot of waste is going on and Gov.UK is not structured for the interface between people and policy and information.
Q166 Dr Rupa Huq: Could it signpost people to other trusted places?
Tracey Brown: Much more. It needs redesigning.
Q167 Dr Rupa Huq: The last one from me is the same one I asked the other panel. How has the media landscape changed since social media and all of this? We used to have weekly calls with Nadhim Zahawi. I think he has been about four other things since then, but he was the Vaccination Minister and we were all—especially BME MPs—encouraged to make our own videos to encourage people to get vaccinated. How trusted are these social media messages, and can they give the veneer of being trusted things when they are just on a nice website and not based on anything?
Tracey Brown: From the NatCen survey I can share with you that people were asked about the most useful source of information during the pandemic. We are talking here about official information, or information of that nature. Some 37% thought mainstream news, 30% thought Government briefings, 15% Government websites and 2% social media accounts. That is where they got information from.
Q168 Dr Rupa Huq: For anti-vax people, often their research is looking on the internet, “I found this amazing video”.
Tracey Brown: Yes. You describe a risk and an opportunity. We have a much more fragmented public conversation now. It is quite hard work. Back when I was first challenging misinformation about things like miracle diets, it used to be that if I could reverse understanding on something, that was a win. If I got The Daily Mail to change a line on something or to correct something, it was a huge win. Now I would not even bother half of the time because they feel so here today, gone tomorrow. The effort involved in doing that would not pay off. There is still a major readership, but I think that attention is quite fragmented, and that is problematic.
Whether you can reach a new audience, there are new opportunities as well. We have people engage with Sense about Science’s material who never would have done in the past, but who managed to find us because we have a lot of interactions. We interact, for example, with people who are minded towards conspiracy material and help people to ask better questions. It creates new opportunities as much as it is difficult to fell them all with one blow.
Bob Ward: Social media has made it easier. We all suffer from confirmation bias to some extent, but social media makes confirmation bias even easier to suffer from by accessing more information than ever before that confirms our pre-existing views and cuts out those that do not. We have to make everybody better at being able to distinguish.
In a lot of cases, people are driven by a desire not just to find accurate information but to be part of a particular tribe or identity, and it is less important that the information is accurate than that you are seen to agree. That is different thing altogether. I do not have the answer, but it is not a question of giving people more information and it will all be fixed. That is not the case. We have more than enough accurate information at the moment. It is about a much broader issue around society and about how we stop groups becoming disenfranchised and disconnected from the mainstream.
That is why we cannot ignore groups at the fringes, because they can have an influence. They can have an influence pushing themselves to the extreme. Remember that during Covid we saw a lot of attacks on phone masts because of the ridiculous notion that they were linked to 5G spread among a small group of people who were motivated enough to attack phone masts. That is why I say that the attack on the Capitol in the United States might seem incredible, to us but to say that it could never happen here would be dangerous complacency. We have to reach out to these groups and make sure we engage them. That means engaging them on their terms as well, and going where they are and trying to talk to them about the things that drive them.
People feeling disenfranchised is our biggest problem and it manifests itself in many ways, including a lack of willingness to vote. It is a major test of how well we engage groups by how much we get people out to vote, because democracy makes this place run. If we do not have people making well-informed decisions and engaging in the political process, we will all suffer as a result.
Dr Rupa Huq: It got harder with all the new ID requirements. Anyway, that is the end from me. Thanks.
Chair: Picking up the point about social media, levels of gullibility and a desire for complete certainty and 100% answers have not changed in the population. I have a vivid memory of a controversy about a rendering plant leaching into the aquifers in my constituency. We had a long public meeting about it, and the towards the end of it the chief scientist was getting slightly bored with questions that were basically conspiracy theories. He was asked by somebody, “Can you give me a 100% guarantee that my children will not be poisoned because the aquifers have been poisoned?” He sighed and said, “I cannot give you a 100% guarantee that a jumbo jet is not about to land on this village hall”, at which point a cry came from the back, “That is not good enough”. It was not social media-related, but there have always been people like that. It is easier for them to get information on social media.
Tracey, Bob and, in absentia, Chris Smith, thank you very much. This has been a fascinating session. Thank you very much for your time.