 Thank you. It's wonderful to have you all with us today for our latest installment of Conversations with Strategy where we discuss some of the big issues in the world and find out more about the careers of some of our illustrious visiting fellows. And I'm really delighted to have with us today Professor John Tesh, who is an exponent on a whole range of matters, but I think will be of particular interest to us today in talking about civil contingencies, planning for risk, for emergencies, for crises like tourism and global pandemics. So there's a lot for us to get out, get our teeth into today. But let me just give you a bit of a background on John before we get started. John spent most of his early career in the Ministry of Defense. He was involved in international security policy. He spent time working for the UK delegation to NATO on nuclear weapons, and was also involved in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003. He's worked in the think tank world at Chatham House and the Royal Institute for International Affairs. And from 2006 to 2012, he was involved as the head of the capabilities team for the National Risk Assessment and National Risk Register, supporting the Prime Minister and Cabinet from the National Security Secretariat, and particularly dealing with these questions about civil emergency planning and response. So John, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to have you with us today. You're welcome. Glad to be here. Fantastic. So yes, I just wanted to sort of kick off by just asking, we do most of our guests. What was it that led you to take the decision to follow a career in public service and moving into civil service in particular? Obviously, we often talk to our visiting fellows about their experience at university when they were sitting in a similar position to those in our audience today. So I just was wondering sort of what was it that led you to take that decision? Well, I think I'd say, first of all, I wouldn't recommend anyone copy my example. I took my finals in classical greats at Oxford in 1976. And as usual, I'd left everything to the last moment. So I hadn't really thought about what I wanted to do with a degree. I wasn't confident I was going to get a good degree. And I hadn't a clue what sort of career I wanted. So I dug around in the library one day. And then I remember that my father had been very keen that I should join the foreign office, because that's what he did all his life. And indeed, what my mother did when she started. And so one of the things I did was apply to the foreign office. But because I wasn't expecting a good degree, I sort of applied through the mainstream. And then at the last moment, I got slightly cold feet because it seemed to me that my father was having hesitations about the career he chose. And so his strong recommendation that I go into public service looking a little bit fragile. So at the last moment, I asked to for my application form to be changed to say that I'd be willing to consider other government departments, not just the foreign office. And I was offered the MOD. So arrived at the MOD, no clear plan, and by accident. And as I say, I probably wouldn't recommend that approach to other people need to give it some thought. How did the did the departments that you worked in, particularly the Ministry of Defense, where you where you start, how did that change during your time in government? And particularly for those who are looking to apply to jobs in those departments today, what sort of advice could you give them about navigating entry into into the civil service? Oh, entry into the civil service. Well, I'd be, I wouldn't do what I did, which is going to the mainstream, because the first thing I had to do when I got to the MOD was reapply through the fast stream. And so that, you know, the waste of a couple of years to have confidence in yourself, if you if you think that public service and civil service is for you, then go for it. If you want to know how the civil service has changed, and what the sort of current priorities are, then I'd recommend you look at the 2012 civil service reform plan, which was done by Audie Robbins before he became the sort of the Brexit Permanent Secretary, and then left government altogether. And there's quite a lot in there about sort of characteristics of life and work in the civil service and the ways in which it's changing. So during the time I was in the MOD, which is 30 years from 1976 to 2006, when I moved to the Cabinet Office, we were already moving in a sort of line towards more evidence based policymaking. I think when I arrived there, there was a lot of sort of making it up as we went along. And there were some very bright people. So on the whole, they tended to get it right. But with a more complicated defence and security landscape, and ministers who were inclined to sort of question advice more than they did, then we had to sort of start getting used to the idea that we had to prove that our policy recommendations were accurate and complete. And taking it to account, you know, the implementability of them, were they practical policy options or were they simply something we invented in the bath? And the 2012 civil service reform plan took that one stage further by saying, not only should your policy recommendations be evidence based, and have a strong practical bent them, they should also be, if possible, open processes. You have to invite experts from outside civil service. And that was because at the time, we had the Conservative government, I actually was a coalition, but the driving force on civil service reform was from the Conservative Party. They were viewing civil service as full of variable people, but a closed shop. And dangerously so. So the skill set you need for the civil service, I think it has been changing. So there's the beginning when I joined, there was a lot of emphasis on intellectual skills, and communication skills, and strategic thinking skills, so you know, the ability to take in the whole landscape, and apply intellectual horsepower that gained doing these high-powered PPE degrees, and so forth, to come up with elegant solutions. And when I left, that was still there, but it was much more about, you know, are you clear about what the context is for the work you would be doing? Have you got a sort of good, organized mind around the analysis of the issue? But also, have you got good stakeholder management skills so that you can engage with and use all the other people that have to be involved? Because, I mean, the impression I have got is, and I'm sure people will say it was always complicated, that policymaking is becoming ever more complicated. Because society is becoming ever more complicated. And yes, thanks for those insights on that. And I was going to ask, actually, because you were obviously in a period where historians now talk about the 1990s as sort of a holiday from history, where sort of big geopolitical and strategic questions weren't quite as huge as maybe they were in the Cold War, or as we've seen in recent years, you were dealing with sort of major national security questions, whether it was nuclear proliferation in your work with NATO, whether it was to do with with questions about terrorism. So what did you learn about sort of risk and managing it from that period of your career? Well, it's funny because, I mean, basically, as I recall, I spent about 10 years from 76, just learning the ropes. So travelling around, going to the Navy, Army, Air Force, did some central jobs to do with military training, and equipment procurement, and so forth to equip me with the sort of breadth of experience you need, because no one ever comes to the MOD actually knowing much about defence. And then I went through private office, I went into the newly formed strategy unit in the Ministry of Defence, which was called the Policy Study Secretariat, which was just gearing up for the big Gorbachev changes in the Soviet Union. People in the academic world to advise us on what these changes in the Soviet Union would actually mean for defence. And also just sort of exercising how we would go around analysing and assessing the strategic risks and opportunities that would come if Gorbachev's promises came to light. I then spent a year doing some management work in the Ministry of Defence, which is something MOD is always doing, it's always reorganising itself. Before they sent me to Brussels to be the sort of nuclear planning rep in NATO as part of the UK delegation. And almost within a year, we had the, I think it was a Christmas day 1991 declaration that the Soviet Union didn't exist anymore. And that it was being replaced by the Russian Federation. And Gorbachev went and Yeltsin came in. And so I sort of didn't have a job anymore. I mean, there was still a year to go while we worked out how much of the nuclear posture we could have safely dropped on the basis that it wasn't really strictly needed. But you know, how much we'd keep just in case there was any sort of comeback. And instead of doing nuclear planning, which is not something I'd had much training for it, but was learning about. I started doing the outreach work to the new, newly independent, if you like, members of the Warsaw Pact, and former Soviet Republics. And people were starting to talk about, you know, what would the nature of the relationship be between NATO countries, and these Eastern European countries? And what would we say if they said, well, can we join? Which, of course, they did. And then what was the meaning of some of the sort of collapsing of states that seem to follow the ending of the Cold War? So Czechoslovakia fell apart, fortunately, an amicable divorce. But when we looked at Yugoslavia, no, you could see the beginnings of what we hope wouldn't be a pattern of internal collapse, failing states in Europe that would bring the prospect of war in Europe back again. We just spent however many years it was, from the origins of NATO, trying to make as certain as humanly possible that we would never have war again in Europe. So, you know, that's really when I started getting involved in strategy. I mean, up until then, I think work in the MOD was largely housekeeping, you know, we would just have to work out exactly how many troops we could afford for the exactly how much money that was affordable within the budget, and the big strategic issues around nuclear deterrence and the nature of the Alliance, you know, all the hard thinking about them had been done. But all of a sudden, we had to adapt to a very different situation. And, you know, if I had to say what it is that made my time in the MOD as enjoyable as it was, after such an inauspicious start, it was that and the fact that, as you say, there was a sort of 10-year interregnum where plenty went wrong. But, you know, the chess pieces were all being reorganised around us. And the process of working out how exactly we would respond to that was what made it all worthwhile, really. And then obviously, you moved in this sort of early part of the 21st century into some of this work in civil contingency and planning in terms of risk. And I'm sure many people in the audience will be aware of the work of large risk consultancy firms like Stratfor or Eurasia Group that deal with these big sort of political risk consultancy on dealing with businesses and advising them. What's the difference, would you say, between say someone is looking at a career in the sort of corporal world of understanding risk and understanding risk within the sort of a government setting? Well, I've seen a little of the sort of political risk work done by firms like that and, you know, control risk for doing my work for a while. And it's a very different animal. They are talking about forecasts of what might or might not happen over the next, you know, generally fairly short period, because political risk is, it's got a very short shelf life risk assessment. The reason why the British government started doing risk assessment was, in a sense, much simpler than that. It's just that when Tony Blair was prime minister in 2000, 2001, there were three, what in retrospect seem like rather minor emergencies, but were embarrassing to the government there because of how badly they were handled. And I think there was one which was a flood in Carlisle, where the first thing that went under the water was the police station where they were supposed to be organising the response and recovery effort. And of course, they therefore spent the first four or five hours of the emergency trying to look for a place to organise the response from. And that wasn't so bad. But we then had the foot and mouth disease outbreak where a small outbreak of foot and mouth disease amongst cattle was allowed to get out of control. And we ended up with I think 16 million head of cattle having to be slaughtered around the country and pictures of army officers supervising the digging of trenches and burning of carcasses, which was all because no one had really thought through the process of responding to that kind of outbreak. And then we had the fuel strike where tanker drivers went on strike, refused to deliver fuel from depots to garages. And within week four night, the country was more at a standstill. And would have been if I think a consultant at a hospital somewhere said, OK, fine. Now you've had your fun. Now the first person is going to die and I want to know who to blame. So they did what they should have been doing in the first place, which was negotiated a way out of it. But it demonstrated that we really didn't have a handle on the perhaps slightly less catastrophic risks. And, you know, we've been so focusing on avoiding Armageddon and World War Three that we forgotten that actually in the real world, lots of things happened. And then Tony Blair asked his cabinet office strategy unit to just look into the reasons why. And they said it's it's very simple. It's the world is becoming more and more interconnected. The world is the science and technology bring huge benefits, but they also bring a downside. And the complexity of the world that we're living in now means that even quite small minor emergencies can quickly cascade and spill into other areas. And moreover, if you're planning for them, you don't really know what the consequences are going to be because in the old days, you know, they would be very straightforward. Whereas now it's ABC that feeds back into a and it's very complicated. Also, they pointed out that governments were in the post war period, acquiring more and more responsibilities for the lives of citizens. And they weren't at the same time building the capacity and the capability to discharge those responsibilities. And as a consequence, people have lost trust in government. And there was quite a big, a lot of literature at that time, suggesting that in other parts of Europe, particularly in less though in Britain, and in the United States, so public trust in government was was, you know, going that way. And with all these types of emergencies, you have to engage with the public. They have to trust you. Otherwise, as we're discovering with COVID, you know, if people won't do what you don't believe you, and when do what you say they should do, then, you know, you've lost control. So yeah, sorry. So anyway, Tony Blair said, Well, you know, we need to do something about this. So they set up the CCS. And it basically over the time that it had since 2001 through to when I left it, it had basically three things it had to do. First of all, it had to get the tabs on the things that are most likely to happen. So we set up a sort of three monthly forward look, looking six months ahead. So that you could just write down a list of what's happened, what the most likely to be most serious, and see what you've got in the cupboard to be better prepared for it. And then when they done that for a couple of years, they said, Yeah, but wouldn't it be good idea if we could look a little bit further ahead and find out what is the worst that could happen? And build some capability to do that because otherwise we're all forever improvising. And so they built up the program that I was in charge of with a five year national risk assessment. And when we've done that, we had the Olympics coming on. So we did another risk assessment for the Olympic Games to join established priorities for resilience work around the Olympics, security and resilience work. And then when the 2010 coalition government came in, they said, Well, actually, what we'd like to do is look much further ahead. So could you have a look five to 20 years and see what are the areas where the trends indicate that we're going to have to change not just equipment and preparedness, but also policy, our whole approach to things. And at about the same time, there was a move to do a climate change risk assessment. And those are the things. So the reason why government was doing it was to build a capability to deal with emergencies. The reason why consultancy firms do risk is because their clients are interested in knowing where they need to hedge their bets. And as you say, that sense of looking sort of long term to the future, which is obviously a difficult thing when you're dealing with questions of uncertainty. And what I wanted to move on to COVID in a second, because obviously that is that is the pressing issue at the moment. I'm sure we'll have questions on that as well. The question I wanted to ask you about first, though, is about you involved in the government's response to the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and obviously after the poisoning of the script powers in source, this is very much something that we dealt with again. What sort of lessons did you draw from that? I suppose that was that something that was already on your radar that this something that might happen in Britain? Or is it something where it sort of came out of the blue and then you're having to deal with sort of a response sort of on the roof? Well, let's sort of Yes, we were preparing for that kind of thing. But no, we didn't have a scenario for that detailed incident. So the 2005 National Risk Assessment, which is the first one we produced. I performed my time because I arrived in 2006. They were definitely interested in chemical biological agents and potential for malicious use of them. As part of what you might call broadly terrorist activity. Did we have that particular scenario? No, but we did have by then the machinery to pull together the people we needed in the same room to understand what's going on. And also the beginnings of a lot of the beginnings, the development out of counter terrorist work, of a process for managing that kind of emergency. And the key here is that you never have a plan for the thing that actually happens. It's a sort of truth well known in the military, that you you tend to have a whole shelf full of plans. You pick the one that you think is gonna do and then it never survives first contact with reality. The problem with the Libyan Niko thing was that we had two kinds of emergency going on at the same time, both caused by the same thing. The first was that their crime had taken place. And the police had to be able to investigate the crime. And the second was that there was a health emergency because this stuff was going all over the place. And we needed public health experts to come in and tell us what the nature of the health emergencies and what needed to be done to make sure that public was alerted to it. And so reconciling two different objectives, that of investigating crime and protecting public health poses its own challenge. But the machinery we just set up, which was basically a flexible sort of toolbox where you you could go into Cobra, you know, which ministers in charge with the terrorist emergencies, always a home secretary, you know who you need to ring up to come in the health protection agency, as it used to be called, and the police and also, you know, the other experts and players. And there is a process you go through to say, okay, fine. Do we understand what the situation is? Can we make sense of what's going on? I actually know what's going on. And the second question then after that is, can we know what it means? Because you can't efficiently deal with an emergency until you've worked out what the consequences are long term, what you're going to have to deal with. Great. I want to open up to questions. So if anyone has question, please put up your hand or comment in the chat. But I'm just going to ask one last question while you're thinking of your questions. That's how I've got a lot more and I'd be very happy to go into those. But just the last one before we open up was, as we move on to the question of COVID was, so looking, obviously, you're looking from the outside. So it's not, I'm sure there's a lot that's going on that we just don't know at the moment. But I was wondering, it just just from your perspective on it, and you were talking about that it doesn't survive first contact with the enemy. And we see a lot of newspaper reporting of Britain preparing for a flu pandemic and not necessarily thinking of something like a coronavirus that it might be dealing with. But what's your sense that looking from the outside, what you think the main lessons are that we might have learned from this, or is really the main lesson that it's impossible to tell from the outside that we're going to need this public inquiry that's increasingly being discussed, because we just don't know what's in daily briefings. We obviously are getting quite a lot of minutes coming out from the sage. So there does seem to be a degree of transparency there that as a historian, I'm not used to seeing sort of government minutes much in real time as perhaps we are with the sage, but at the same time, we don't know exactly all the conversations that are taking place, the sort of the risks, the potential crises that are being confronted. But what would be your perspective on looking at this from the outside, having been in a role where you were thinking through a nightmare scenario like this when you were in government? If you're asking me to pass judgment on the COVID-19 performance, I think I'm going to pass for the reason that, as I've said to other people who've asked me this, I think there's a long way more to go in this. Although people like Laurie Friedman, you know, or your neck of the woods, and time Wesley have done quite a lot of good reporting on events as they happen. And, you know, I think I haven't seen anything that they've written about it that hasn't run bells with me. I think the final judgment will have to wait. There's another reason why I think I want it to wait. And that is because when you're looking at resilience, I found when I started doing the job in 2006, there was quite a lot that wasn't known about the nature of resilience, about the best way of managing the risks of disaster. And people were sort of making it up as they went along. But there seemed to me to be three aspects of resilience that, you know, you needed to get right if you were going to have the perfect response to a major emergency like that. One is the thing that everyone's focused on at the moment, which is the response. And the response by government and by organizations throughout the country that we involved in this. And but the response itself, it's going to be better if you have been able to build up what the global risk network of the World Economic Forum calls resilience characteristics of the country, which are, you know, the characteristics of being robust and resourceful and and having sort of spare capacity of people, organizations, government, and the economy. And when we were trying to build a resilient strategy, we sort of started to get into that by making sure that at least the providers of essential services had a lot more information that they could use to build their ability to, you know, carry on going through a major emergency. And then the third bit of resilience is the need to adapt to changes in the risk environment. And if I was planning a commission on COVID-19, I want to see all three of those things done, because if we just stop now and say, well, the government was a bit slow starting, it was a bit in two minds as to whether to try and preserve people's livelihoods or preserve people's lives and so forth, then you won't have got the full picture. I think the other thing I'd like to say about it is that by the time I finished, we sort of done quite a lot of work with other countries. And there was a sort of agreement that the management of critical risks and COVID-19, you know, certainly critical risk by any definition, depends on a lot of things which are not to do with PPE and so forth, it's to do with behavior. And so when we start to judge the behavior of the government on this, I think I'd use these five headings as a way of working out what they did right and what they could have done better. And the first is whether they effectively worked across boundaries. And, you know, the boundaries that we're talking about are not just international boundaries, which are just being tested at the moment with the vaccination nationalism debate that's taking place, but also the boundaries between the public and the private sector, the boundaries between the emergency services, the boundaries between central government, national government, regional government, local government, and the boundaries between science and policy and so forth. So resilience is a sort of collaborative function. And if you don't get that wrong, then, and then I think arguably in the United States, I got really badly involved with arguments between, you know, the scientists and government and so forth, which are just unhelpful. The second thing is whether they understood the risk. And then we have the argument about whether they put too much emphasis on planning for a flu pandemic. And somehow missed the trick because COVID's current viruses are different. I think that's my view about that is that we can always improve our risk assessment. And I'll be amazed if there wasn't more work done on the variants that there are of infectious newly emerging infectious disease. They did have them on the register. I remember having SARS when I started. I think they were taking into account Ebola, Zika, and a whole lot of others. But what they won't have done yet because you can't have a separate plan for every single disease epidemic. Well, you can, but it's a hell of a lot of work. The third thing is whether they communicated the risks effectively. And the clear reason for that is that the, was what I said before, if you can't tell people what it is that they have to do, and you can't communicate a sense of competence in government, then the thing gets out of control. And again, we've seen that in parts of the United States where anti-vaccination theories have been rife. And also in parts of the world where the implication of curtailing people's civil rights, unless they see some convincing case for temporarily surrounding their freedoms, then you may well be lost. And then the, I can't remember, I had five, didn't I? Well, one of them is also making sure you know who's responsible for it. Or for planning and responding. I think the only thing I'd say there is that resilience, you may really have to build from the bottom up. And there's some indications that they could have made better use of the local resilience forums and other sort of more local agencies than they did. But it's always tempting when you're dealing with the major national crisis to keep the sort of instruments control to yourself. It's quite difficult to let it go. Yeah, I'd be interested to see other people's experience. I mean, obviously, one of the things from teaching online at the moment, where obviously people are not all in Britain at the moment. So I'd be interested to hear people's perspectives from their countries, whether there's any of this sort of relates to them as their whether there's any sort of comparative angle that we that we can learn from. But yeah, there are any questions that jump out? I have a number that I would I would still love to ask. But is anyone any questions they want to want to throw out either in the written chat or by putting your hand up? I'll give you a second just to compose yourself for that. Otherwise, I'll move on to another one of mine. Okay, well, while people are thinking I'm gonna ask actually, just the difficulties of planning for uncertainty and contingency. And particularly, planning for something, which as you mentioned, it's so difficult when you're when you're planning for things which you just you've got you've got no idea what's going to come down the pipeline. And are there are there intellectual ways of thinking? Are there are there educational programs or there are certain degrees that would help you to be better at identifying things thinking outside of the box and you've been talking about sort of a strategic mindset? I mean, are there ways that you can be better at planning for uncertainty? I think you can get to tied up with the uncertainty argument. I think it's certainly worth if you're investing major resources in it, I as governments do, then you have to take account of uncertainty because it's part of the investment appraisal. But the basis of the strategy that I was part of implementing was that we would look at one end of the spectrum, the things that are most likely to happen. And the other end of the spectrum, the things that would have the worst impact if they did happen, even if it was quite unlikely that they would happen. And we built up our matrices, people who have looked at the National Risk Register, and they'll see the sort of result you get, you get a picture where there are some things quite a lot of things that are relatively low impact the high likelihood. And, you know, for those you need to be pretty well ready because one or other of them is probably going to happen. They tend to have similar effects. They hurt people. They disrupt essential services. They cause economic damage. They can't call it environmental damage. They cause anxiety. And, you know, you just need a plan to deal with that kind of thing based part of on miscommunication. You tell people these things happen. And when they do, this is sort of thing that you have to do as an individual. Or this is sort of thing that you have to do as a business. And this is what, in the meantime, the emergency service is going to be doing. So there's that bunch. Then you have the, what we call the realistic or reasonable worst case scenarios, which are really for the government to deal with, which say, okay, fine, some of them, not many of them are going to happen very often. Unfortunately, a pandemic was reckoned on fairly high likelihood, high, very high impact contingency. But if there's a reasonable chance that they're going to happen at all, then you need to look at those. And so that way of looking at things saying, okay, what's the most likely to happen? What's the worst that could happen? Here's the basis for preparedness planning, using whatever you've got on the shelf, for the most likely stuff, and contingency planning for the more serious, but hopefully less frequent things. When it comes to what you do about them, then, you know, my simple rule of thumb is that there are quite a lot of them where you can't prevent them from happening. But if they've got a very serious impact, then your first protocol is to work out how you can prevent things from causing the sort of damage that they do cause. And there's usually only three ways you can do that. You can either work on the risk itself. So if you're talking about a terrorist, then you can prevent people becoming terrorists, or you can make it more difficult for them to do what they want to do. So inhibit their capability and their motivation. And in addition to that, you can reduce your exposure to them. So if you're talking about a flood risk, then, you know, put your your housing in a place where it's not exposed to flood risk, coastal flood risk or river flood risk. And if you can't move them, you can't do that, then you look at vulnerability issues. So, you know, put your flood barriers and so forth. And all of this is part of the thing that the government adopted way back, which is basically a risk management strategy. So you start with anticipation, which is looking ahead and looking back and saying, what's going to happen? Then do the assessment, which is how serious would it be? If it did happen, what are the impacts going to be on the things that we care about? So human life, essential services, so forth, so forth. And then then you get to the prevent side, which are the ones that we want to try and prevent, either by working on risk itself. If we can, and if not by working on exposure and vulnerability. And then you get round to the prepare thing. Okay, assuming you've done everything you can to prevent the ones that you want to prevent, then how can we get better prepared on the assumption that sooner or later, one or the other will get through. And so you're dealing with this in quite a sophisticated, nuanced way, sort of, and I've seen you written in really interesting ways about scientists that drive it rising policy makers. How do you deal with policy makers? You have these very sort of short term, very short term considerations. They might be thinking there's a bi-election coming up in a few months. Well, I've got to go and Andrew Marr on Sunday and I've got to announce something or Piers Morgan is on Twitter and he's raging against us. We need a response. How do you deal with that when you're when your job is mainly to take a step back and think broadly and think in a sort of a more sort of cooler mindset when there's all these sort of things which are sort of heating up the political process? Well, you do it deliberately and systematically is how you do it. And ever since we, Tony Blair, decided he wants something done about the risks of these emergencies, all governments since that time have received more or less every year, first of all, and then every two years, a comprehensive risk assessment which says this is the worst that could happen in about 80, 85 different types of emergency. And we reckon the impacts are like this and we reckon that the likelihood is like that and it fills a matrix which should be read or looked at the national risk register. You can see sort of thing it is, except the government national risk assessment which we now call the national strategic risk assessment is a lot more busy than the national risk register is. And they can see what the assessment by scientists and other experts is of the different risks. We usually put up some recommendations and say, look, we've actually done quite a lot of work on these so far. The next step would probably to do a little bit more work on these which have a little bit more difficult and maybe a little bit more research into them. And it's just a systematic way of going through the full range of 80 to 85 risks and saying, okay, this is how they look at the moment. These are the ones where we're not so certain. And before we put a lot of money into them we'd like to do a little bit more of a search. These are the ones where we're pretty certain and we also think that our capacity is not up to scratch and the lead government department then would be invited to go and do some more investment on it. In all these things and one of the things that issues that's going to come out with the COVID, there's the distinction between capability and capacity. Since 2001, the capability of British governments to deal with it. Capability is the ways of dealing with these risks. The science that you've got to deal with, medical science you've got to deal with pandemics and so forth, is very high. What is often not so high is the capacity because if you have, you're able to, you understand what the risk is and you have the technology or science to deal with it, then it's no good if you haven't got enough of that. Very often the issue is capacity. With COVID-19, the capacity of the health service, which is for many, many years being run on making it as efficient as possible, has probably suffered by comparison with say Germany, where they spend something like 12% of GDP on health services and so forth. You start with the risk assessment, the grid, the matrix with the ones in the top right hand corner where you have to have a plan to do everything, to try and prevent it, prepare for it, and you put everything into it because it's the most likely and the most serious. Then the bottom right hand stuff, you might delegate down to a local level and say actually these are local emergencies. What you need to do is to build up the capacity to do this. Then you have the stuff on the left, the sort of black swans, the low likelihood, the very high impact ones, where on the whole, where I would be looking for is to try and improve what you've got rather than invest a whole lot of stuff against an event that might not happen more than one in a thousand years. One final question I wanted to leave us with is, and as I say, this might feel free to bat this away. Is there one issue that you think at the moment that perhaps we're not paying enough attention to that sort of down the line from your works of thinking in a few years down the line, we could come over the horizon and be a real challenge that we're going to be facing, but which we haven't really in the political bandwidth at the moment, or journalistic bandwidth, we're not spending enough time thinking about. Well, I'm going to put a disclaimer on this because the risks that we included in the National Risk Assessment and later in the National Security Risk Assessment are risks of disaster or emergency. And on the whole, there's a fairly clear definition of what we mean by an emergency, which is an event that causes harm to human welfare or national security somewhere in the UK. So in order to qualify, it's got to physically hurt someone or something. Well, thank you very much. Forgive me for giving us your insights on these topics, such urgent ones, but also such such important long term questions that we'll be thinking about. And yes, I think for anyone looking at a career in the civil service in the political risk world in these questions of planning and resilience, there's some real food for thought. And yes, so thank you so much, John, for joining us today. And we look forward to having a chance to chat again soon. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Cheers.