15
Examination of witnesses
Zainab Agha and Jonathan Martin.
Q158 The Chair: Good morning and thank you very much, both of you, for taking the time to come and help us with this important inquiry. I should remind you that this is a public session. It is being broadcast live. You will both receive a transcript of the session in a couple of days’ time. If there are any small inaccuracies that you need to correct, that is the time to do it. If you suddenly think of something you wish you had said, we always welcome supplementary evidence in writing if you think of anything.
We have a lot of questions to ask each of you. Before you give your first answer, could you introduce yourself briefly so that we have that on the record as well?
It seems to me, and it has been reflected in a number of the submissions of written evidence that we have seen so far, that the resilience action plan is seen to be heavy on response and recovery but rather light on planning and preparedness. I wondered whether you agreed with that or could comment on that. What are your views about how preparedness and resilience are linked at national and local levels, including through the regional forums, and how gaps might be bridged between those two things?
Zainab Agha: Thank you to the committee for having us today. I am director for resilience and recovery at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The UK resilience action plan sees the local resilience forum in England as a critical part of the resilience system, bringing together local partners and expertise in planning for, responding and recovering from emergencies. It also underlines the importance of partnership working, both with the local resilience tier in England and with devolved Governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
MHCLG, so my team, provides the central role in linking the national and local together across the resilience cycle. This means, especially in terms of planning and preparedness, that each local resilience forum in England will have a dedicated resilience adviser, who will work with them on planning and preparedness—for example, making sure that there is development of local risk assessments aligned with the NSRA risks. They will work with lead government departments in bringing together local resilience forums and lead government departments to prepare for certain risks—for example, we have a local-national energy risk planning group—as well as making sure that local partners are part of exercising. As a recent example, Exercise Pegasus, which was an exercise for pandemic preparedness, involved all 38 local resilience forums and was a very useful exercise in strengthening the local and national joins.
We will do the same in response and recovery. Members of my team act as government liaison officers during a response, making sure that there are joins between the local and national and identifying, for example, where you might need sharing of mutual aid across local resilience forums, or indeed where chairs of strategic co-ordinating groups, which are the local response structures set up, need to attend COBRA, again to strengthen the national and local join.
The resilience action plan acknowledges where things need to be strengthened to strengthen that function. There are a number of actions we are taking forward on that, including a new LRF partnership assurance framework and peer review model, which adds to the work that we currently do to assess local capabilities, again from a planning perspective—I can go into more detail on that—as well as improving data sharing and the commitment we have to clarify the role of strategic authorities and mayors as well. There are a number of actions in that and we will continue to deliver those.
Jonathan Martin: I am the director of project delivery and major events in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which does not actually include the title “resilience”. That probably is a reflection of the fact that we are not a national security-focused department, but I have responsibility for co-ordinating resilience and incident response within the department as well.
We would echo the points around saying that we have seen a genuine shift evolve within the Cabinet Office and the wider structure to start thinking about some of those social policy departments and get us engaged much more. As a department, we are a very strong convener of positivity across the piece, in terms of saying how we are able to convene our sectors to support this work. A lot of what we are doing is trying to create that kind of national story, with a cohesive and confident narrative within it, which we see in a lot of what we do, and recognising the cultural capital side of things within that. That is where we take this point around not just the response bit, but trying to look at how you strengthen those institutions locally, regionally and nationally as well.
The Chair: Could I follow up quickly? We have been told, I think by the Cabinet Office, that the Government’s intention is to establish a strategic resilience forum. I wondered, from both your departmental points of view, what that needs to have written into its constitution, if you like, to prevent it becoming another talking shop. If there is going to be a strategic resilience forum, surely it needs to have specific responsibilities and accountabilities. Would you agree with that? What is the way to do it?
Zainab Agha: The commitment to the national strategic forum will add to the number of forums we already have that bring together different partners at different levels. For example, we have quarterly meetings with all the local resilience forum chairs in England. We bring together a wider set of local resilience partners twice a year, which includes voluntary and community sector and businesses. Then we have various other forums at different levels that do the same.
The intention of the national strategic forum is to make sure that we have a forum where we are sharing situational awareness and strengthening that information flow between all the partners that are there in the resilience space. The resilience action plan clearly recognises that our response across the UK is a whole-of-society response. We need to make sure that we are enabling all our wider partners to contribute and support the delivery of resilience forums. That would be the intention of the strategic forum itself. One main aim from my perspective would be to make sure that it recognises the flexibility that we need to be able to respond to emergencies of various different scales. It needs to recognise the principle of subsidiarity, which means that most of the response to emergencies will be led at a local level, where they have the most expertise.
Jonathan Martin: I would echo many of those points. The main thing for us is that shift where this is not a national forum that is dictating to a local level. It is one that is understanding how you can do the interfaces better and connect people in a more effective way. That feels like a positive step forward, as opposed to the kind of central diktat of, “You must do it this way”. How do we improve the pipelines of information? How do we ensure that we are genuinely reaching all the different levels and helping to connect any that are not in the right space for that?
Q159 Lord Marland: Following on from your question, Chair, the Cabinet Office also told us that DCMS is engaging with the VCFS—the voluntary, community and faith sector. Can you give us some progress on that, please? What are you doing in terms of funding? Also, what information gathering are you doing for the vulnerable people and those providing assistance?
Jonathan Martin: I will come back a bit more on that. We are producing a VCS protocol, which will help make sure that those linkages are being made with each LRF and the VCS sector. We are working with them to ensure that that information flow goes through, in terms of the importance of getting that right.
At the regional level, those voluntary groups are plugged into the local resilience forum. It is really important that we do that and make sure that we have that clear interface with the formal emergency responders and are not duplicating effort when people are going through. People from the voluntary and community sector are quite often the first to arrive on the scene. It is important that there is an effective use of that skill set and an understanding of what they can and cannot do as we go through. We are keen to make sure they also have a role in national decision-making and are able to feed in really clearly within that.
We are funding to the tune of about £2.5 million. There is a tender under way at the moment to support the civil society infrastructure piece. That should supplement the work that the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership is doing at the moment. That will be staggered over three years, so it is not huge amounts of money, but it enables those civil society groups to share views and insights and collaborate with government on resilience, to strengthen that knowledge and understanding and the interaction between different voluntary and community groups, and to build on and develop approaches to utilise the role that civil society can play at a local level within that space.
Zainab Agha: Shall I come in on the data sharing? From my engagement with local resilience forums, I understand the challenges that they have in discharging their responsibility to identify and hold data on vulnerable people, as well as maintaining updated lists on voluntary and community members who can be deployed in emergencies, because of the compatibility between different systems and need for data sharing protocols. Cabinet Office last year published guidance for local resilience forums to be able to identify and support vulnerable people, including data-sharing protocols. The Information Commissioner’s guidance has been really helpful in this regard, which makes it clear that data sharing in emergencies, where there is serious risk to life, is completely fine.
Centrally, where we have information on vulnerabilities, we will share with local partners. Recent examples include any information that we held on people who were coming back to the UK as part of the response to hantavirus or who were being repatriated as a result of the Middle East conflict.
MHCLG funding in the past has also been used by local partners to develop tools, which were really great to see. Cumbria LRF in particular has developed a tool using property data to identify vulnerable individuals. In the south-west, LRFs have done something similar, where they have used mapping software to identify vulnerable cohorts as well as deploy resources to them. We are very interested in using those lessons to strengthen the local resiliency as a whole. I have some dedicated team members in my team who are thinking about how we best do that, working closely with Cabinet Office on the tools that it has, so that we can make sure that we are plugging in that information nationally and locally.
The Chair: Lady Paul wants to go into further detail about the local resilience forums.
Q160 Baroness Paul of Shepherd’s Bush: You have answered or alluded to some of these questions, but we would like to dig a little deeper, given the importance of the local resilience forums. I wondered about the long-term funding for the forums and what the role of the trailblazer programme was within that?
There are a couple of other subsidiary questions. We are slightly concerned about, or have some interest in, what the boundaries of the local resilience forums are when you consider potential changes to police forces, issues around, as you have already talked about, maybe further devolvement to local mayors and the different structures that exist in Scotland and the way that they have responded there. We are interested in that. We are also interested in how you mobilise the private sector, particularly around exercising, as there is no obligation to do that.
Then I have a general question, if you do not mind. I realise that there are a number of questions. How would you characterise the level of preparedness among the local resilience forums? We put a lot of emphasis on them and they are a very key component of our response. We would like to get a sense of how prepared you think they are for the variety and the number of events taking place all at the same time.
Zainab Agha: I will take these in turn. Apologies, this will probably be a long answer.
Baroness Paul of Shepherd’s Bush: I apologise for how much there was.
Zainab Agha: On funding in particular, in line with the committee’s report from 2021, MHCLG now provides direct multi-year funding to strengthen LRFs’ core co-ordination role. So since 2021-22, MHCLG has provided around £34.5 million to LRFs and has committed to £30 million, so £21 million core capacity funding and £9 million approximately for trailblazers, for the next three years, so LRFs have the certainty to plan. This averages around £180,000 per LRF.
Two and a half million pounds of funding has already gone to the trailblazer programmes that you mentioned. They are part of the stronger LRF programme committed to in the UK resilience action plan, with funding going to Cumbria, Manchester, Northumbria, London and Suffolk. That is testing how we can strengthen leadership accountability and integration with different models. I am very happy to go into some of the emerging learning that is coming from the trailblazers. Our intention is to make sure that that plays into how we strengthen the system as a whole. The MHCLG contribution is part of the overall contributions for LRFs, with LRFs also getting partner contributions and in-kind contributions. That makes up the totality of local resilience forums.
On the boundary question, the strength of local resilience forums, as I see them, is the fact that they bring together local partnerships with local expertise to respond to emergencies that reflect challenges and risks as they apply to areas. As an example, south-west LRFs cover predominantly rural areas with high levels of visitor economy and will be thinking about impacts of severe weather and coastal flooding. North-east LRFs will be thinking about the critical national infrastructure they hold in their patch. The LRF model allows that flexibility. As Jon said earlier, those local insights shape responses.
One strength of our current model is that it is able to flex to respond to the scale of the emergency. For example, the recent outbreak of MenB involved Kent LRF only. For the heat-related emergency that we had last month—you could say we are back again, although not quite emergency level yet in technical terms—we were able to convene affected LRFs in a response co-ordinating group, so bringing together a different configuration of LRFs. In some cases, such as the response to the Middle East, we brought together all LRFs to share situational awareness. The current model helps to flex and scale up.
In the UK resilience action plan, we have already committed to clarifying the role of strategic authorities and mayors. We are engaging with strategic authorities, taking learning from the model that is there in Scotland and models that exist in other countries, such as the US and Finland, to make sure that we are strengthening and clarifying that. That supports the regional lens.
We are mainstreaming resilience considerations into reviews, including the review of police boundaries, keeping in mind, of course, that we also have changes to local government as a result of local government reorganisation. There have been changes to integrated care board boundaries as well. At the moment, the geography is no less creative. As an example, Cumbria is one LRF where there is a broad degree of alignment between council, police and fire geographies. In contrast, Thames Valley LRF, I believe, encompasses one police, three FRSs and 14 local authorities. Already we are talking about a very different geographical pattern as far as LRFs are concerned.
You asked about whether we include private sector in exercising. Local resilience forums will include private sector in some of the training and exercising. There are some good examples in London and elsewhere. Dorset LRF does the same in some of the responses to its risks. There is more that we could do to make sure that there is more consistency in that approach. That is something that we work with lead government departments on, as well as making sure that, when we are engaged with local areas, that is something that is there.
On the level of preparedness, we have different processes to assure ourselves of that, which include doing seasonal preparedness twice a year. That is basically where LRFs self-assess themselves against their level of preparedness. We work with Cabinet Office on local capability assessments, which look at the level of preparedness that is held at local level, aligned with NSRA risks and national capabilities. As I said, we will be rolling out this year a local partnership assurance framework with a peer review protocol, which is designed so that we are bringing challenge into the system and building on the expertise the sector holds itself to assess that.
Jonathan Martin: That was a long set of questions. Our main engagement point in all this is the voluntary and community sector and ensuring that they are woven into that local resilience forum route. We have some really good examples, including around Southport and other areas, where they have done a really good job in doing that. We tend to find that, where they are most used to engaging in crisis and being able to respond, they are much better at engaging and knowing who their local responders are. We only tend to step in at those points where it is not working or there is something in the response that needs a bit of clarity in terms of how the voluntary sector is engaging.
We do a little bit as well around understanding what the skill set is. You cannot predict exactly what skill set a volunteer is going to turn up with. The Red Cross and others that you will have heard of bring a wide variety of everything from search and rescue through to managing support mechanisms effectively and crowd management for local events and engagement. For us, that weaving in is the really significant bit. That is certainly the bit that we are looking to make sure happens much more systemically, including through the protocol that I mentioned earlier.
Q161 Lord Oates: My question is primarily focused on you, Mr Martin. We heard evidence from the Finnish ambassador that they have 50,000 shelters for a population of around 5 million, and many of those are in sports facilities. Obviously they are on the real front line. I wondered whether you could tell us a little bit about how the Government go about recruiting cultural and sporting organisations to provide a network of community hubs and emergency information centres and shelters.
Jonathan Martin: I should be open at the start that we do not actively go and recruit those organisations in. The reason we do not is that they are quite a fragmented and diverse group, so there is no overarching network to pull them together. The other reality is that it is that local-level engagement that is probably quite crucial on there. The local planners will know where their cultural infrastructure is much better than I would and how to make use of that. We will come in and intervene if there is a problem or challenge within that. We are working across those in the implementation of new legislation, such as Martyn’s law, to make sure that they are fully engaged and aware of what the responsibility is. We do not have a direct role in recruiting.
The evacuation and shelter bit is a policy area owned by the Cabinet Office and I know that it is engaging across the VCS and others, looking at some of this area. That process is something where we should be focusing on that local tier to be able to understand and connect all the different local areas and spaces that can provide support. We saw a lot of these institutions stepping forward during Covid and being vaccination centres. We saw an amazing range of activities that libraries provided in terms of response, in getting key worker status during the pandemic but also looking at how they can support people to get on the NHS app and at a much wider group of responsibilities, as well as that cultural integration and being a first port of call for a lot of people coming into the country. We are keen to ensure that we can support that, but we do not have an overarching programme to recruit those individual organisations.
Lord Oates: Do you, the Cabinet Office or somebody in government have sight of where all those shelters are and who is providing them?
Jonathan Martin: I do not at the moment. The Cabinet Office may do. I might have to come back to you on that one.
Zainab Agha: Shall I come in and add something from a local perspective? This is a good example of the work my teams do on the national and local join in preparedness. My teams will work with LRFs to encourage the identification of rest centres and shelters. A good example of that is the work that Wiltshire and Swindon LRF has done, which has set up a protocol for emergency information centres across the country in the event of a national power outage. It has done that thinking on the back of some innovation funding provided by the department. That is an example of that. As Jon said, given Cabinet Office’s role in being the lead government department for mass evacuations, we will identify where there are concerns at a local level that cannot be addressed at that level and escalate that to Cabinet Office to see whether there is more national support needed.
Q162 Lord Peach: Sticking with the broad theme of command and control, how do you feel the local government system, which you have outlined very clearly this morning, and the central government responsibilities come together? We have heard that there is quite a lot of good practice in the devolved Administrations, whereas in England, generally, there is not as clear a regional structure. For example, we are not just dealing here with climate and other emergencies. We are also talking about national emergencies.
Specifically, you talked about Exercise Pegasus. Without trying to use military language, how would you describe Exercise Pegasus and beyond as a means of stress testing the whole command and control system, including bringing in the military and the blue-light services? Is that beyond the scope of the LRFs? How would you see that being commanded and controlled in the event of a genuine national emergency?
Zainab Agha: It is what Jon was talking about at the start and what the UK resilience action plan underlines. The system that we have in the UK is around a whole-of-society resilience approach and making sure that we are enabling and empowering all partners to participate and work collaboratively to deliver the plan for, respond to and recover from emergencies.
As I said before, one of the strengths of the local resilience tier in England is the fact that we can flex to the scale of various different emergencies, whether they are very localised, whether we need different configurations of local authorities to come together to respond, or indeed whether they are national emergencies.
We do this across the resilience cycle. We have various different forums, as mentioned before, where we will use and share situational awareness with local partners. By that, I mean local partners in the widest sense. We will have the mechanisms in place to make sure that we are engaging with each LRF to identify where there needs to be escalation to a lead government department, such as DHSC, which leads on pandemic preparedness, making sure that we are joining the local and national in any training and exercising, and indeed to identify whether there are things that need to be done at the Cabinet Office level.
Scotland has a model that formally has regional structures, but builds on the local into the regional and then national. The work we are doing, which is committed to in the resilience action plan, is to think about the role of strategic authorities and mayors in providing it. We are thinking about how we strengthen and clarify that and whether that provides an additional regional lens to our current structures. Flexibility and making sure that we can respond to the range of impacts that can happen and risks that can materialise is important. The strength of the system is its ability to respond to all of those.
Jonathan Martin: I would only add a little bit on the value that we derived from having VCSEP and the Red Cross with us at a national level during the op Pegasus, so that we can reach in and understand what their capability is. That ability to, at each level, have somebody who genuinely understands that sector and how the linkages can be made is really significant.
A lot of what we are trying to understand within the department in an event of a crisis or a pandemic is the impact that it has on a group of our sectors that are particularly vulnerable to areas where people cannot gather, given that that is an awful lot of what DCMS’s core requirements are. We are gathering data in order to understand the impact and what effect it is immediately having on things such as tourism bookings all the way through to attendance at various major events as they are going through. There is a bit about how you take action to ensure that all that information is fed in and that you can take sensible decisions at that point, with the right people in the room, which is significant.
Q163 Lord Spellar: In no way do I underestimate the importance of having structures, and I congratulate you on the work that you have outlined and what you are doing on that. In order to engage those groups, and indeed individuals and the wider public, there has to be a narrative that tells them why this matters. Why is it important? Why should these organisations be playing a role? Is this not a far-off problem? We have seen how, therefore, that leads to levels of inactivity, which we then have to work very fast to retrofit.
What consistent messages are being put out to all these organisations as to why we are doing that? It is not the what, but the why. Where in central government is that core point where they are pulling this together by getting on to opinion-formers and by putting in very straightforward narrative terms to the general public why it is important and why they also need to be engaged and involved? Where is the centre of gravity for all this in government? It seems very difficult to detect.
Zainab Agha: I would say, and I think Jon would agree, that it is Cabinet Office that leads on any plans on public narrative and public engagement. That is something that I can say that it is definitely thinking about quite actively. From a local perspective, we will make sure that we are amplifying those messages. Local partners will have their own communication channels that are trusted by the communities that they exist in.
In terms of engagement with local resilience forums, we are very clear collectively on the risks that the UK is facing and what we need to do collectively to respond to that, as well as preparing for any specific risks, where we work very closely with lead government departments, as well as LRFs, to make sure that those are understood, using the various different forums that we have. In terms of whether I have a level of confidence that we are sharing as much information as possible on the wider context in which we are operating, as well as the narrative and why certain risks need to be prioritised or focused on, I can say yes. It is Cabinet Office that leads and oversees some of that, in terms of both communications and any public-level engagement.
Lord Spellar: Offices cannot speak. Who should we invite before this committee to address us to reassure us and explain to us what they are doing?
Zainab Agha: You might get those answers from people who you have already invited who might be attending in the future.
Jonathan Martin: I would echo some of that. I might come on to this later. Some of the commemorative events that we engage in, and indeed a lot of what DCMS engages on, are around some of those less formal structures and how you engage young people in particular. It is not necessarily, “A government spokesman says…” As you say, the comms narrative needs to be quite nuanced and careful.
A lot of what we find, through incidents such as Southport and other things, is the desire for trusted voices to come with a clear narrative at that point. Both of our departments, in terms of the voluntary and community sector and the faith groups as well, need to find people who are willing and able, without us saying exactly what they should say, to speak with an authenticity that connects with people in a way that is more significant. I get slightly nervous about one single overarching, “Everybody must do this”, and think a bit more around how we find lots of different ways of reinforcing that message at a local and regional level to get it to people who actually listen, as opposed to being just talked at.
Q164 Lord Oates: Compared with other countries, we seem to have a much higher degree of instability in local government structures, with what seems to be never-ending local government reorganisation. What impact does that have on the effectiveness of our resilience? Could you address that?
Zainab Agha: I keep going back to the strengths of local resilience forums, but one of their strengths is the ability to bring together various different partnerships at a local level in response structures. They are, by their very nature, multi-agency partnerships. That strength, in the context of the fact that each of those partners will be delivering a wider set of responsibilities, and where there will be reform targeted at them, means that it is very important that we are consistently thinking about the impact on resilience as a whole of those changes.
In terms of local government reorganisation, my teams are making sure that we have guidance in place so that we can make sure that local unitary authorities are very clear on their responsibilities on resilience under the Civil Contingencies Act. We are also following the Grenfell inquiry recommendation and working with the local government organisation Solace and the UK Resilience Academy to make sure that we have training in place for local authorities, local authority chief execs and wider local authority officials on resilience, so that we are underlining the importance of that.
As I said, on the changes that relate to police boundaries, we are already thinking about the role of strategic authorities, engaging with them and engaging with various other partners to make sure that we are clarifying and strengthening those. That is the commitment in the UK resilience action plan.
Jonathan Martin: From my experience working in Lancashire and other parts of the country, the structures may move, but a lot of those individuals know each other and interact with each other regularly, particularly in the policing world and some of the other blue-light services. That connecting point can survive quite a degree of administrative restructuring around the edges of it. That does not mean that it is not important to make sure, as Zainab set out, that there is a structure to support people in that process.
Lord Oates: The public are not always as familiar with these constant changes. What impact does that have on them?
Jonathan Martin: I suppose it is at what point it impinges on the local consciousness. A lot of people in that set of circumstances just want the response to be in the right place at the right time. When you connect with those communities, you tend to go down the levels through to understanding the local council engagement officers or things like that, where we have them. Tower Hamlets is a really good example. It has a very good set of engagement officers who can go out and engage at whatever level with the public on that side. Whatever structures that sit above them, it is just getting the right messages through to them.
Zainab Agha: Can I supplement that? One thing that the LRF stronger trailblazer programme that I spoke about is testing with the trailblazer funding is how we strengthen accountability and make sure that that is as clearly communicated as possible.
Q165 Baroness Paul of Shepherd’s Bush: How large is your team working on local resilience forums?
Zainab Agha: We are collectively, I think, at the moment 77.
Baroness Paul of Shepherd’s Bush: Is that at the centre?
Zainab Agha: My teams are spread across England, including three place-based teams, which sit across and support LRFs. We are 77 overall. We are very distributed across the piece.
Baroness Paul of Shepherd’s Bush: That is everybody who would be employed to be working on local resilience forums across the country.
Zainab Agha: They are working on the link between national lead government departments, Cabinet Office and local resilience forums.
The Chair: Do you have a resilience headcount?
Jonathan Martin: I have a very small resilience-focused team of seven. We have some other areas, for example broadcast resilience and the voluntary and community sector piece, but we are very small in numbers across the department.
Q166 Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch: Thank you both very much for coming. You have slightly touched on this. We have heard from lots of witnesses about the changing media landscape and the proliferation of outlets, or platforms as they are called now. There is a lot of disinformation, misinformation and mischief-making, and it can be downright dangerous. We heard from the Cabinet Office about its local media action plans, which it said would address these concerns. I would like to know how they are being implemented. How is it going?
Jonathan Martin: The local media action plan was published in March. That is aimed at ensuring a healthy and plural local media for the benefit of communities across the UK. Core to that is getting that level of trust locally, so that people trust that local journalism side and so that it directly reports, as you said, on some of the institutions. It needs to critique and ensure that it is getting accurate information out and being trusted locally.
We are helping local newsrooms across the country innovate and adapt their business. A lot of that plan is focused on how you keep up with digitalisation. That is why this week we have launched the fund, which is £12 million over two years, for the local news. It is called the local news fund. We are uplifting community radio as well by £1 million over the next three years to do that. With that, we are trying to focus on that digital innovation. We are not there to prop up local news, but we are there to give them as much support as we can to get themselves into a position where they can impact and affect people.
We are trying to make the best of the advertising money that the Government spend. We spend about £4 million a year at the moment across government within local media. We are continuing to reinforce that and leaning into that. There is a bit of work that we are doing with the West of England Combined Authority to facilitate that better engagement between local public services and local media, so that there is more of a joint effort. That is a testing point at the moment. We will see how that goes and then try to roll it out more broadly as well, so that you build those connections and that understanding of it. That is part of understanding that the relationship between those groups is really critical and should not be combative, in the way that it can be, but at least that engagement is really key.
We are trying to do a bit more about journalism as a career. We have a pilot in the north-west at the moment. How do you inspire people to want to go into local journalism and see the benefit of it in terms of how that can be used? That is particularly around how we support schools to navigate their way through online interaction, trying to put more emphasis on the free publications that go out to all of the primary and secondary schools and how people access that. There are about 150 local and national publications that schools can get access to, so we are making sure that that is woven in a bit more and a bit more prominently.
Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch: That school thing is a very good idea. Start right there at the bottom and get them to trust what they are hearing. This decline in trust and facts is the real problem we have.
Jonathan Martin: We recognise that you can spiel a lot more journalism out with AI and other things, so it is how you get that genuinely. It cannot just be rotten boroughs or some of those wider-known publications. Again, it is something around how you interact with that. Some of what we are doing in our youth strategy is around that desire that every child should have an adult they trust, a thing they want to do and a place to do it. That is right at the core of what the youth strategy is.
That plays into resilience all the way through if you have that network and that engagement, in the same way as the better futures hubs and other things where we are trying to get multi-agency groups together to engage and understand youth challenges in the region and have a single place where people can go to get advice on a wide range of stuff. There are those sorts of elements of how people engage and interact. That is partly around the ways in which people want to come to DCMS and engage in a way that other government departments perhaps do not get, because you are enforcing something. A lot of people want to come to the sports clubs, to the youth centres that we are building and all of those sorts of areas. It is really important that we continue to engage in that.
Zainab Agha: Local resilience forums have an obligation to make sure that there is trustworthy communication. They publish community-level risk registers so there is awareness of risks facing the community. We will work with them to make sure that they are engaging with all of what Jon said, so, for example, LRFs establishing working relationships with local BBC radio to make sure that those communications are amplified at the local level.
Jonathan Martin: Post Southport, we did behavioural insights team research around the positive effect that local journalism can have in those scenarios of getting the right messages out into the right spaces. What you saw in some of the cultural responses to Southport, around the library in particular and the rebuild effort around that, gave you that really positive sense of how people really care about these things. One area I am responsible for is how we commemorate Covid. When you talk to survivors or people who have lost people through that process, they will most often refer to the things they lost during Covid as being going to watch the football match, seeing the play or engaging locally with people in the local libraries. Those sorts of areas really matter.
The Chair: You mentioned the word “commemorate” there, which links very nicely to Lord Farmer’s final question.
Q167 Lord Farmer: Thank you for your contributions today. This is about encouraging resilience within the population. We have heard that we are not, compared to other countries, a particularly resilient people at the moment. My question is about looking back and the commemoration of other conflicts. You could even look back to this last weekend and the England-Mexico match as an example of extreme resilience that could be encouraged in the general population, particularly young people.
My question particularly is on past conflicts, for instance the two World Wars, the blitz and the spirit and this whole idea of defence of our freedoms, democracy and our way of life. Do the Government have an approach of using these commemorations to encourage resilience, or do they not even think about it?
Jonathan Martin: The quick answer that is yes, we do. I genuinely, over the last few years, have looked at how we can expand that. It might not be specifically on saying how you prepare for resilience, but it is an understanding of what that climate might look like, particularly aimed at young people.
If we look at the VE Day celebrations, we had a fantastic level of activity. One in four Brits engaged actively in some form of activity related to VE Day in particular. We have focused really heavily on how you get that youth engagement in particular. That includes a lot of our arm’s-length bodies. I will give a shout out to the Imperial War Museum and the National Theatre. There is the ability to think creatively. James Graham wrote us a little play that imagines the day after the end of conflict. That was touring around schools last year; it toured around until early this year. That is how you get children to engage and interact with it.
There is “Letters to Loved Ones” and that reality of what war is like that people can imagine themselves in. We had 285,000 schoolchildren across the UK who responded to the VE Mail campaign about sending a letter and getting a letter back from a veteran. We are in a period where there are fewer and fewer veterans available and VE80 might be the last one where there is a big celebration. It is about how you get that living memorial. The Imperial War Museum, I think in the next few weeks, is hosting something about how you impart that knowledge to young people and an open forum around it. It has been a brilliant collaborator with us in trying to be creative in how we approach it. It is the same with Historic Royal Palaces.
A lot of our arm’s-length bodies can get that reach out and do it in a creative way that gets people interested. Candidly, if you are just saying “You must have this many hours’ worth of stuff”, it does not quite capture the imagination in the right way. They are able to tell some of those stories in quite a creative way. We had a production company that supported us to do a small app in terms of showing 3D photos, what that felt like and how that looked in colour. There are different ways of engaging with young people. We are really happy that our youth engagement for VE was really high. Some 40% of those aged 25 to 34 said that they were actively involved at some point or another in terms of the VE Day celebrations. There is that reach-in, the schools materials that we can do and the work across departments to get there.
A lot of what the events can give you is a single moment that people remember. In how that comes across over time, you can see that resilience and understanding of what it means to be at war. I would also give a shout out to some of the intergenerational charities. Intergenerational England is really good at trying to connect that through, as are libraries increasingly at looking at intergenerational. There are some great examples of where Alzheimer groups are engaging with mother and baby groups to get that connection across. That is a part of wider resilience. It is just a very specific set of community angles to it.
The Chair: Thank you very much, both of you. That has been very helpful and we are very grateful for your time.
