 The proceeding will start shortly. Good morning, everyone, and a particular greeting to our two witnesses this morning. And I realize it's not morning for you, but welcome nonetheless. And thank you very much for giving up the time to be with us. This is our first session after the summer recess. And we're really looking at the experience of people in other parts of the world of the whole issue around coronavirus and how it's impacted on public services. And we're really pleased to be able to host this session so that we do think a bit more broadly outside of just what's been going on in this country. We do have an hour for two witnesses. We have Todd Criball from who's deputy chief executive of the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, and Audrey Tang, who's minister with our portfolio in Taiwan, and has been doing a lot of work around data and use of data in tackling the virus. So I'm really pleased that you're both here. And I want to open the questioning by firstly to asking Todd what what fundamental strengths and weaknesses in has COVID-19 revealed in the New Zealand model of public service delivery and in government culture. Thank you, Baroness. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak this morning. Maybe just opening with a little bit of context. I think that we have recognized that good public health is good economics. We've had to rely very much early on on, I guess what I would describe as textbook use of traditional public health measures. So it's been the isolation and social distancing. And we honestly have not had a lot of choice because some of the public health function has been a bit neglected and run down. And initially, we probably didn't actually have enough capacity to do some of the contact tracing the virus was a little bit the R value is a little bit things were spreading a bit faster and we could track things down. It would be fair to say that we probably weren't more than maybe a week or two away from being another Italy, we did go hard and fast but only just. And I think we also had the opportunity of being an island nation in a fairly small country. We know that the first lockdown that we had in April took about $20 billion off GDP that was three years of GDP growth wiped off just in that brief period. But no one is arguing that that was the wrong thing to do. The government has had a very strong monetary response with the quantitative easing and a very strong fiscal response as well. The cornerstone of that would be some of the weight subsidies. But it is fair to say that some of the strengths of the public of the public service have come to the fore and particularly important at this time. There'd be two things I'll highlight one is that we do have a really strong culture of cooperation. So it would be the case that all of the cabinet papers and all the coordination was done jointly and it wouldn't be acceptable really for any department to go off on its own without having done that proper consultation with the other departments that had a major interest. And that's that's just part of the way the culture is and I know from the senior roles I've had in the health ministry. The prime minister's department and minister ministry for the environment that is just the way you do things and there's sort of a. I guess a social system or you know a peer system that it just wouldn't be tolerated to be anything less. I think the second fundamental strength is we have had very high levels of public trust and social license going into this so. Early April that the survey firms were looking at a question think that was thinking about how the New Zealand government is responding to the coronavirus outbreak. Do you think the measures that put in place or and then it was about right. The response to that in early April was 60% and by the end of April it was over 80%. So I think the fact that we had some strong trust and social license going into that really was if nothing only strengthened during the course of that first that first lockdown. But there are some weaknesses I think that have been revealed in the public service model so notwithstanding that I think we have a very strong culture of cooperation I think we also also saw that some departments have their own cultures. And you'd be aware of that I mean with my health background for example I would say health people can be very caring. Very much about patient choice. But in this case it's actually quite a you're flipping that around and the patient is in fact the population and we're seriously thinking about protecting a group of 5 million which is a slightly different. So the scenario to what I think health people have been used to and we have we did see some cases slip out people were left to go home to self isolation if they didn't feel well they were meant to sort of let health authorities know which is it's not surprising now that the border management is being done by it's led by an air marshal. And the number two is from the Department of Corrections, because I think they've had different cultures about maybe perhaps more rules based approaches to things so it's been a very interesting lesson for us I think and bringing different cultures to those cultures and those those services which are most fit for the job I think it's been one thing that revealed itself. The other really important thing I think we've identified is, and if you work in health and safety in the workplace you know that the terms about work is imagined and work is done. So I know for example the Prime Minister and the Director General of Health had this idea that certain things were happening so, you know, it was in their mind that this was that certain things were to be happening with testing with PPA. But you get this drift in implementation with things aren't on the ground on the frontline exactly where they're quite meant to be yet. So I think that whole monitoring function has revealed itself has been absolutely critical. What you can see in your role as parliamentarians is the kind of thing you want to be asking people in the frontline what's going on because their reality is a little bit different from what you're hearing from senior public servants and you've got a bit of a distance there. So that was probably the other thing I think it's really revealed itself as a bit of a weakness for us. That's very interesting. I have any of my colleagues. Do any of them want to ask a question here. Do you want to ask, what about the link between national and local government. I mean, I know. Yes, so that's an interesting one. We do have a lot of local government for a small country so we have 80 district councils and we have 20 district health boards. And there's just been some a big review of the health and disability services and it looks as if we will have fewer district health boards soon. Everybody thinks we have too much local government but it was an issue because while the director general had direct powers under the Health Act to make things happen that the staff that had to do things were employees of the district health boards or would be sitting out in local local government so there was more coordination than you might think would be needed or required and I think that is definitely an issue and that's come up quite a bit I think recently. So I think there's some issues around whether or not we do see some consolidation particularly of some of the public health services. I know that there are some changes happening with public health England and elsewhere around the world. Two people are having a fresh look at some of those public health functions. I think here we're realizing that we probably need a bit more honestly a bit more centralized approach to some of that. That's interesting. I'm going to ask Lord Davis to come in with his question there. Okay. So my question is for Audrey Tang. And it's given your extensive experience in digital communication at clearly a strategic level. So what can we learn from Taiwan's experience of COVID-19 about how digital technologies can be used to improve and perhaps democratize public service such as health education and local government to the benefit of the people. Thank you. In Taiwan, we have a very easy to remember three pillars of what we call digital social innovation strategy is called fast, fair, fun. The fast part and I think by far the easiest to to adapt and copy to other jurisdictions is simply setting a very simple toll free number. In our case 1922 where everybody can just call and report on the field experiences that I thought was just talking about to the core sensor and the core sensor basically listens as skill so that at each and every live streamed center command center press conference, they answer all the questions that is proposed to them in the previous day when we're still in a pandemic stage or now every week. And so this very quick iteration cycle, for example, the boy who called saying that I don't want to go to school because I have his pink rationed masks and resulted in the very next day everybody in the medical offices. I've streamed watching this when I do to report just don't the pink medical masks so the boy become the most hit boy in the class. That is a classic example of a very quick iteration by radically essentially crowdsourcing citizens ideas and a fair part pertains to, for example, where rationale the mask making sure that people can see and this has been deployed in Korea as well. In real time, where the mask is not where the mask has to have some stock. And if you click on it and people queue in line and use why your national health insurance caught people doing after you actually see the number decrease in real time every 30 seconds. Again, this is a way for participatory accountability to gonna trust this early capable with digital technology such as essentially a distributed ledger. And finally, the fun thing is about internet means which is cute dogs and cats mostly. So, for example, this are social distancing. I mean, which says that in outdoor spaces, you have to keep three, sorry to Shiba Inu's away and indoor three Shiba Inu away and that Shiba Inu the spoke stock of our health and ministry literally is a companion animal of our hashtag officer, the participation officer of the minister of health. So that we very early on say you wear a mask to protect you from your own and washed hands, which connects must use and hesitation, which is the most important link to get out. So basically have science, give science a higher value than conspiracy theories. That's something that other jurisdictions can also look into. Very interesting. Can I just come back on that quickly. Could you just expand a bit on that call center issue and how that operates. Oh, yes. Yes, so the call center is both a toll free number, and also a chat bot, and also a website so it has many different apis application programming interfaces, just like the mask availability map where there's more than 100 40 different applications, the chat bot slash toll free number basically enable anyone to use their preferred way to ask questions to the CCC. If it is a question that is already freshly answered, the newest answer gets turned into cute dog pictures and circulates around social media. But if it's a novel, a new idea, like the pink mask or the use of traditional rest cooker to disinfect the mask, which is a real thing, then it becomes the content of the next day's live streaming. And so this is both a listening device but also a co creation ideation device. Thank you. Okay, can I now go back to Lord born to ask his question to Todd tribal. Thanks chair and thanks to our two witnesses for joining us. Yes, my question is specifically really for Todd. Obviously we've been watching in the UK the experience in New Zealand with great interest we two are a small island obviously with a much larger population but our experience has been very different and I just wonder if, if Todd can perhaps expand on some lessons that he thinks we could learn in the United Kingdom, clearly the whole government reform that he's been a central part of with vast experience has been part of it which he touched on public trust in this country has gone from a high level to a lower level the reverse experience. It seems to me from from New Zealand so I just wonder perhaps if you could expand on factors which which he thinks have led to the success, certainly in relative terms in New Zealand great success and what we can learn in the UK. Yes, I thank you Lord born yes aside from the things I mentioned about that strong culture of cooperation and coming into this with a high degree of trust. The other thing that came has come through very clearly is the listening to experts. So, we have had the epidemiologists are now all rock stars in this country because they really had a lot to say, and it has been interesting to see particularly the academic, including some of the retired academics have had a lot to say very publicly and it's clearly come through in the decision so this has been an interesting aspect to I think for the public service. I would have been putting up advice to ministers and as you know that gets considered as free and frank and without fear of favor but has done, at least initially in private but this has been much more of a public discourse. We've also had something called the science media center where there are actual people that have been trained up to be spokes people that are go to go to is if you like for the media. This is some of that fake news situation that you know that we have worldwide. They're really worth there were there was a real flight to authority, I think, by the media. So that listening to experts was really key. I think the other key thing for us to is that it was touch and go but we did with the expert advice, end up with this idea of an elimination strategy. But it's not decided we wouldn't have covered outbreaks but that we will be able to stamp them out pretty quickly and it was a decision that was made. Yeah, based on the expert advice that we could actually achieve this and I know in. We question some of the early WHO advice where the WHO advice was that you really shouldn't do water restrictions but I think W some of that advice to us hadn't been considered at the scale of smaller island nations I would say we're probably a bigger nation but as you are but it does seem to be something that allows for a different form of management of the of the pandemic. So I think some of that border management and isolation and quarantine combined with that broad approach was the right thing. The other the other thing for us, importantly, I think was the communications around the alert levels and this idea of having a bubble. We've had four real clear alert levels so people kind of understood if you're going up levels or if you're dropping down levels you could see that things are going to get tighter or you actually had hope that things would then, you know, PM would be signaling the Prime Minister would be signaling when we might be dropping down levels. And a lot of this was well telegraphs that people had a sense of women might be coming out of some of this. So the concept of bubbles then was introduced I think that was pretty much levels three and four where we had to define what a unit was and to be this also I think raises some very interesting issues about society and what constitutes a bubble because we had, as you would know you've got blended families and you've got households that might just be students flatting together or something so it raised some interesting issues about that but there was a real concept of what it meant to be in a bubble. It was important early on from making sure we control some of that and that was just to communicate a simple communication device that was, I think very effective. The other thing I point out is that you did see with that communication each day at one o'clock it became must watch show of the day was to watch the PM's press conference and in that conference you had what they ended up calling it was the there were five key players in that there was the quint so a group of fives it was John ombler who was the national controller he was a former deputy state services commissioner, the now retired police commissioner Mike Bush. You had Ashley Bloomfield, the director general, you had Sarah Stuart black who was the controller of civil defense and there was another fellow Peter Crabtree who it was providing some of the overall national strategy coordination so you had this visible of five that all appeared at some time with the Prime Minister. So the point there being that they are identifiable leads within each of the various departments. So, in fact, except for one of these none of them were the chief executives of the department but they were very senior identifiable people that were the go tos. And those were the ones that were providing that that tight coordination. So I think that that was also very clear I mean it does we do benefit from having a relatively small public service people do know each other. I think they'd be meetings together, you know, on time to time so having that relationship capital I think was also very important. Thank you. Lord born did you want to come in again. Well just to say that the epidemiologists as rock stars is going to stick with me I think that's a really important point. We've got something to learn on that alone. Yeah, yeah I don't think they ever would have expected it. And I can ask Lord young he wants to come in with a supplementary. Yes, this is a question for Todd and I want to pick up something he said about the public service model. One of the issues we've come across as our committee has made progress is the criticism of departments acting as silos and being reluctant to cooperate with each other and I was very interested in something that was in the briefing about New Zealand which says the way you tackle this, it seeks to achieve this by setting up interdepartmental boards to address high priority issues. Bringing together chief executives from relevant government agencies, the boards will have the power and budgets to deal collaboratively with challenges such as reducing child poverty. And does that work on the budgets. Do they get the budgets direct from the Treasury, or does each of the departments that are contributing to this chip in. Do ministers sit on these boards and what is the what is the method of accountability of these interdepartmental boards and how many other. So thank you Lord young. This is a great question so under the new public service act. There is this possibility of having these joint ventures of these chief executive boards as you say. It's still very much in its infancy infancy and I was fortunate enough acting for the director general to have been the health representative on briefly for the family and sexual violence joint venture which is actually the first one so that's essentially leading things out. As chief executives on the departments that you would imagine are relevant to those issues. I would say it's still finding its way somewhat but the idea is that everyone commits to a unified plan for that joint venture and you don't have your own departmental work streams on that you bring everything there and the decisions are made collectively. That really is a unified effort on those cross departmental issues. What what it's doing I think also in large part it's stopping the departmental budget bidding wars. So that all of the budget bids to the Treasury would go through that joint venture you couldn't have an outside budget bid it's one that's agreed to by the joint venture so by the time it gets to the Treasury. I understood as being the best offering from that collective for that joint venture. A slight aside thing that's also happening here I think to intended is it will stop employment bidding between departments for for civil servants, because you will be potentially on the same kind of pay grade and they'll be a bit more interchangeability and interoperability. As a policy advisor it's it means the same thing across the public service. So I see it have some having some benefits not just for all of government but also for the public find this whole public issue around the public finances and how we deploy our human resources within the public services. It's still very much in its infancy but I think it's it's promising at this point in time. I think the covert groups have been ones that have existed for a while I wouldn't say they're technically set up as joint venture or chief executive boards but they are defective. I wonder if it's possible to have a memorandum on exactly this particular issue from Todd or his department, giving us the background and the motors upper and I these interdepartmental boards because I think it's a really, really interesting concept which might have some relevance here. Thank you. Yes, I guess we can do that. Thank you. Thank you. Good. And now I've got Lord Falcon. Thank you chair and thank you Todd and Audrey. It's a question. I'm looking forward. Mostly we've rightly been on crisis response at this point in time. But I'd be interested in asking what are is the thinking in both New Zealand and Taiwan about the, the really big public policy questions that you now think in the light of the crisis. And without loading the question too much. One of them for us would certainly be about health prevention. Our system focuses on treating ill health much more seriously. And it focuses on trying to keep people healthy. So I'd welcome your thoughts on the public policy issues and priorities in the light of the crisis going forward. And if you wish to comment on the relevance of improving health, health resilience individually and society. Todd, do you want to start off? Thank you, Lord Falcon. The one big project I would want to mention is that the Institute at the Institute here we've just gone joined in partnership with with the Helen Clark Foundation, former Prime Minister to look at inclusive growth for the next generation. We do see that some of this impact of COVID that it's very interesting to think about the distributional impacts of who the, you know, if you like the winners and losers are. And we see it as a real it's a crisis and it's an opportunity not to be wasted and we really do want to use it to think about how we might think about things like predistribution rather than redistribution that it's the opportunity to come up with some different new ideas about how we might provide and close some of the equity gaps for young people. We have definitely issues and COVID revealed this for Marty and Pacific populations. It's the disadvantage has just been revealed by COVID. So that we see, for example, mortality rates and Marty are about 50% higher than in the general population. So those the opportunity and I think to deal with some of those equity and disadvantage issues are really coming to the floor. Very interesting. Be really interesting. Again, if there's an existing note on that, because it's, it's obviously thrown a light here, exactly the same way. And certain groups, certain individuals, certain societies have been much more at risk than others. And it's thrown a spotlight on those weaknesses. So we would love to know more about your response to that. Thank you. And Audrey, any comments from from Taiwan on that. Definitely, I would like to echo what Todd said. And interestingly, we also have our quintuple in the daily CCC press conference as epidemiologist rock stars. And because in Taiwan we benefit from the idea of broadband as a human rights, which we have deployed since last year. So right in time of the pandemic anywhere in Taiwan if you don't have 10 megabits per second at unlimited data at just 15 per month, it's personally my fault. And so because of that, our top epidemiologist, our chief epidemiologist, you know, crash courses on coronavirus, which is a very well attended, massive online open course, our type of epidemiologist happens at a time to be our vice president So when he wants to convince the president, he just knocks the door next door. But anyway, the idea is that we see that people learn and meet much more closely online, because while we never had a lockdown, we did for a couple months put restrictions on large gatherings. And so we see a lot more like satellite learning, which also benefits the people who are more indigenous, the rural, the remote islands and so on to basically engage in a co presence co education of infrastructure and that infrastructure benefits now from our 5G auction, because for the extra money that the 5G telecoms put into the 5G bit, we make them to start the 5G deployment first in the under resources places, the most rural places and so on basically transform both our healthcare and education using like this very cheap 5G virtual reality headset for classrooms and things like that. So this is a great opportunity because the senior decision maker basically are forced to encounter the latest in video conferencing technology and and discover that it's nothing like what they remember 20 years ago. It's actually pretty good nowadays. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Can we move on now to Lord Hunt. Thank you. This is my substantive question, chair, or is this a follow up? Am I allowed to follow up? You're allowed to follow up too. I was very interested in Lord Filkin's question about the future. I wanted to ask you something too. I wanted to ask about vaccines and the extent to which both Todd and Audrey have given thought to you both mentioned fake news. Have you given thought to strategies that will be necessary to persuade your people to take up the vaccine? Audrey, do you want to go first? Well, in Taiwan, we already had a habit of wearing masks, which we do refer to as the physical vaccine and because the numeric models shows if more than three quarter of people put on the mask and keep sanitation, the R value will be consistently under one, which is as good as having a vaccine. And so we're not in that much of a rush to get everybody vaccinated. I have to say this first. And then beyond that, we look forward to work with our humor over rumor counter disinformation strategy, which is a consistent strategy that basically whenever there's a like anti-vax rumor that you just alluded to, or whenever there was a election interfering rumor before our election, there was countless disinformation campaigns about the Hong Kong protest and things like that. We take a book of the humor over rumor on putting a notice and public notice, meaning that instead of an administrative takedown, we work with the social media companies so that there's a very clear public notice whenever it is debunked by an international fact-checking network, including Taiwanese members of the And then whenever you share one of those disinformation on the social media, it will say like, for example, that this is a Reuters photo and it has been modified and recaptured by people who work on disinformation. And this came from this certain way board account and things like that so that people learn the whole story, the whole narrative and basically become kind of amateur fact-checkers in their spare time to basically contribute into media. So we don't have media literacy, we call it media competence is also part of our K-12 education. So basically enlist citizen's creativity in making, again, the humor spreads faster than rumor. Fascinating. Okay, Lord. No, we move now to Todd. Yeah. Well, yes, so what I would add to that I think that idea of a physical vaccines an interesting one. I'm going to use that. I think we have had issues around vaccine hesitancy for some time so that's not a new thing for us. And I would be thinking that we would again be relying on what we've been doing with this I mentioned before the science media center and there is enough there isn't a comment in the media I think that we perhaps could manage that but I do know that when you're looking at herd immunity. You have to make sure you get your vaccine levels up high enough in the book I've been talking to the specialists are saying, you know, they're really there are there have been no COVID vaccines. If you look at the probability, you know, if you look at the history of vaccines, they will take up to a decade or more to produce. They may end up more like a cold vaccine we have to have it seasonally so I think here while there's a lot of talk about vaccines and there's a lot of hope that and there's even this expectation that some very small universities would be producing them. I do worry about some false hope on that front so I do think there's a little bit of a reality check needed on that and it might be that yeah we need to be talking more about physical vaccine. It might be that there are some therapeutics coming as well it could help but yeah I think this is again one where we have relied very strongly on the advice coming to the Prime Minister she does listen to her chief science advisor and we've seen that throughout so I think we were just back and what we've seen the quality of the dialogue and media chasing the right sort of scientific advice would probably see us through I'd only hope so. Thank you. So your next question. Okay, so this is to Audrey and I was fascinated by your description of fast fear and fun in terms of your, your strategy. The question I got. And again from what you said about the use of mass is the Taiwanese population has been largely receptive to the messages that have come from from the government. I just wondered, first of all, whether you could kind of confirm that or not, but then how do you think some of the techniques you've used in digital strata technologies, which you've used to improve and democratize public services. To what extent do you think those are transferable to say the UK with that, obviously a different political culture. Thank you for that question. The first one, which is really about why are people receptive of the science and clarifications and memes. Of course, it's not just cute dogs, but because we make sure that we amplify the best ideas from the civil society from the social sector that is to say these are not our ideas. When people show that masculinity map is better than the whatever tabulated PDF or whatever display is better than then we take that right and every year we already have a culture actually for a few years now before the pandemic. We have this idea of a presidential hackathon where every year the top social innovators like more than 200 this year propose their idea on how to use data to form data collaboratives to, for example, reduce plastic use or measure air quality and water quality and so on. The top five teams receive a trophy from our president each year and a trophy is shaped like Taiwan with a micro projector that if you turn on the micro projector, it shows you Dr. Tsai when handing you that trophy. So it's a self describing trophy and in that small film you will hear Dr. Tsai when saying whatever you did in the past three months, we commit to make it public policy national policy in the 12 months afterwards. So basically this is presidential power as heckles on price. And so this kind of co-creative culture naturally then incentivizes the social sector to bring their best ideas forward and our work mostly is just to innovate those ideas. So if you ask a random person on the street back in March say and say why are you wearing a mask. They will not say oh it's because the spoke stops tells us to. They will say you know this is a great idea that we hear from this professor lecture or whatever that talks about traditional rice cookers and so on. And we put on the mask when the CECC tells us to and we put on the mask when the CECC tells us there's no need to because for 48 hours or so we were wrongly saying that in well ventilated places such as the metro stations you don't have to put on the mask when people ignore that. So we change our message very quickly just two days afterwards. So we learn from this failure culture. I think that is the most important thing to keep amplifying the best ideas both from the front line public service and also from the social innovators and that I think is transferable because Taiwan also had a culture of anonymous civil servants. But when we really give credit to the front line public servants that come up with the good ideas make them basically the heroes. And as ministers we absorb the risk that changes the you know the matrix of rewards and that will then make the social sector innovate more with the front line public sector people. I think that part is transferable. Thank you. Can I just ask I mean you mentioned the impact of some of your experts and clearly the UK we have experts as well, but they don't always agree with each other. And we've had, I think one would call a healthy debate right from the start of this crisis where they've been legitimate disagreements between scientists public health doctors about the approach that continues. I just wondered if you had also experienced conflicts between the experts and how you moderated that. I think so in Taiwan we benefit from this societal inoculation from the 2003 SARS. Nowadays I should call it starts 1.0. Incidents in which we had to lock down an entire hospital unannounced and was no fixed termination date of that lockdown. It was very traumatic. Everybody above 30 years. I would remember that incident which is why we're so of us against lockdown, which is why we never had a lockdown in the first place. And so basically the consensus of the scientific community while it of course differs and legitimate debates on SARS 2.0, which is novel coronavirus exists. Basically the baseline is we do whatever we do assuming that this is the same as starts 1.0. And so that form a baseline consensus on top of that for example around must use the asymptomatic of course is the main difference between starts 1.0 and 2.0. But the message and I quote where it must to protect you from your own and washed hand that has brought agreement. So it's rough consensus. We push that out first and then we deliberate whether asymptomatic where the mask are used for or not on the scientific debate, but the one that has rough consensus. We first push them out with the spoke stocks and so on. Thank you very much. Interesting. Any of my colleagues would like to come in on this. No. Yes. Hi, can I come up just back quickly on Lord Hunt's question, which I very much agreed with just taking that on the point about doctors as rock stars. That's great. But how did you manage the potential political tension. Political as your political leaders are having to make decisions that assess risk that might not be able to be completely in line with a pure medical view of simply containing virus. I think that's more of a thought question because in Taiwan, as I said, the author of the textbook epidemiology was literally the vice president. Yeah, Todd, you want to go on that one. I think that's been an interesting one here too. There was a point where I think the Prime Minister was almost beginning to get criticized a bit much for listening almost too much to the science and that she was the, you know, she gets gets paid the big bucks to make the difficult political decisions on things, but I think we were so successful and we've been so successful today that that's just gone away. I mean there was some discussion and all we should be taking a bit more of a Swedish approach on things but I think the this the the proofs in the pudding and the eating and I just think we've managed we've managed to get through this and they ended up being brittle opposition to it, even with the election coming in a few months. You know the opposition parties are all, if anything, giving the government a hard time for not, you're not doing doing the job doing the policy as rigorously and as firmly as was set out so there really isn't any objection on the fundamentals there. Okay, if there's no one else on that issue, can I bring in Baroness Pitt-Keithley and just to warn the witnesses you won't see her because the camera on the computer she's using isn't working this morning. We apologize for that. And my apologies to the witnesses as well. I'm so sorry about that. It's been very fascinating to hear what you've had to say. Having worked with health and care services in New Zealand in the past, I very much appreciated the way in which people do know each other and work across boundaries. And many of your show and tell accessories Audrey, we will remember for a very long time, I think, but I want to ask you actually how to sort of comment on the UK and how we've done because you will have heard a lot about what's happened with us. And what do you think is the most important lesson? And obviously this will come from your own experience. What do you think is the most important lesson that the UK should learn when we go forward trying to redesign public services in the light of what's happened in this pandemic. And perhaps you could start Audrey, that would be all right. Okay, thank you for the question. When I first become digital minister that was in 2016. I modeled my office after a certain UK unit called the policy lab. Which is part of the UK cabinet office if I understand correctly I did visit there is at a perimeter of the government's basically kind of like a Lagrange point between the social sector on one side using ethnographic or just hanging out with the stakeholders. And then on the other side, of course, is the cabinet offices or its departments and silos and so on. And this has always fascinated me how we can apply the insights from design thinking into policymaking. And I was also fortunate enough that one alum from the policy lab from Ray John John who it was a Taiwanese actually returned to Taiwan to bring the policy lab working methodologies with us. And now we work with other designers from from IDO from RCA and so on on this design aspect. And I think the one thing that taught me that those excellent interaction designers and service designers taught me is that. When you're doing design thinking a lot of the cause of the policy that we think soft things and actually causes more problems of externalities is because this inherent solutionism that is embedded within the bureaucratic culture that we have to do something and do it quick and solve a problem. But in design thinking in the double diamond thing basically before delivering anything or developing anything is important to ask the question of this common value and then out of those very different positions is this something that people can live with. So it's a solutionism is basically something that is perfect or near perfect for a particular issue. But a rough consensus is something that people can roughly live with and resonate with one another. This illicit for example we use assistive intelligence that's a I to ask people to rate and rank acceptable measures of using digital technologies to counter the current virus in the collaboration with the defective U.S. Embassy the A.I.C. on the current virus hackathon co-hack dot T.W. and every time we see the large debates on the devices parts and then we promptly ignore those. And then we only act on the one that has brought consensus no matter which ideological camp that the people are. And so basically crowdsourcing the agenda stepping back a little bit to define common values. I think that is one part that has worked really well in our counter current virus but as well as any other large broad structural issues facing the society when we're designing policies. Thank you very much. And Todd I think many of us would have been particularly interested in what said about joint budgets with with departments. If you could include that in answer please. Sorry if I miss do you mean in terms of some of the use of technologies. No I was I was thinking about about the the way that you talked about having joint budgets in in the working across the park. Yes so that the joint ventures will be joint budget. Yes so the joint ventures will be putting together have a direct appropriation for whatever it is that they're they're particularly a focus is so. I think that is that will be a much tardier way to make sure that resources are being you know corralled and channeled appropriately and not being. You know the best project the best offering from different departments and try to and try to you know bring those together and coordinate those after the fact I think it's much it'll be much tardier if we can get that working effectively and I say it's really just that family and sexual violence one at the moment. There'll be others on their way soon and I can give you some more information on that. Thank you and has that kind of approach being particularly important in your work with coronavirus. Well I think it has been that the fact is it's all happened so quickly I think it is in as I was saying earlier it is in the culture of the way we just do things. That new legislation that new Public Service Act will make that a bit more give a bit more structure around that. And as I said particularly around some of those budget things and there's lines of reporting and accountability so it should only get better from here I think and again I think just the coronavirus thing has been a great example of that even that wasn't done officially informally. And in terms of your advice to us and you mentioned silos and we've had a lot of problems with silos as some of my colleagues have mentioned is that one of the things that could tackle most urgently when we're thinking about a public service reform. Well I think I would say you have to because all of the interesting and difficult public policy issues are in the interface. They're not solely within a health silo or a primary industry silo or the environment silo the ones that cross. And we talked earlier Lord Falcon about some of the prevention things you know you're not going to deal with some of these issues are on disadvantage and improving health status unless you deal with base you know security of tenure of housing. Security of income state stable family or household units these things are coming from water social determinants that need to be factored in unless you're working. So we do have within the prime minister's unit at the moment of child poverty and we unit we need to do much better on that we didn't score very well on the latest UNICEF report, but that's the kind of thing that unless you're working collectively across that you're not individually everyone just ends up pointing their fingers at each other and you'll never get there. Yeah. Thank you very much for reminding us of the breadth of our gender. Thank you very much. Thank you. Baroness pick easily. Now I have Lady Tyler, who would like to come in. Thank you very much. And it's a follow up question really from the point that Baroness Keith Lee was just asking and indeed which Lord young raised earlier about particularly in New Zealand this new approach for cross government working. And looking at the difficult issues with different accountability structures budgets, ways of civil servants work etc. All countries have faced very difficult trade off issues about the balance between sort of health outcomes keeping the public safe and the impact on the economy. And I was interested to know whether you felt that this new way of looking at looking at issues on a cross government basis and actually made some of those trade off those decisions easier to make and sort of with gaining greater acceptability with the public as well and perhaps Todd could start with that. Yes, thank you very much. Well, the way I look at these joint ventures is that they are really trying to unify around not just one but there are multiple policy objectives in place. So it means that you know there might be health objectives but there also might be some policing objectives there might be some other child wellbeing objectives. And the joint ventures can can grapple with those more I think because they take responsibility for each others and it isn't just simply looking after only your own single siloed set of objectives. So I think that really is where that value comes through in that accountability they're accountable collectively for multiple policy objectives. They're not left to their own departments and their own budgets on that. Could I specifically just ask was there a joint board that was looking at that issue about the sort of how to balance the competing objectives around public health safety and keeping the economy going. So what I would say on that one is that that quaint that I mentioned that was the role of that group very much to coordinate that. I don't think it was actually officially set up as a chief executive board or joint venture but I can but I can confirm that if you if you allow me Baroness I'm strong I'll come back with something on that. But it was as I say it was part of the culture the way we just do things so even if it wasn't formally set up quickly enough it was yeah just it's the it's the expectation and that's exactly the kind of thing I think we'll see with more chief executive boards and joint managers coming. Thank you. Audrey is there anything you'd like to add from a power trade off to a sort of dealt with in Taiwan. Yeah definitely. Well we actually probably will record a GDP growth this year. So that that's not much of a trade off that we have to make. But I think one of the key of that is basically our quaint basically shared very early on in advance that says if we achieve elimination as defined by four weeks with zero locally transmitted or confirm cases then we can safely move on to the stimulus part the revitalization part. And of course we kept our words. So right after that is the stimulus part and we have this triple stimulus vouchers where you can spend only outdoors and not on e-commerce you spend outdoors 100 British pounds you can withdraw two thirds of that back from your nearby friendly automated telemachine and things like that. So it's way to stimulate the economy. And one of the reasons why that this trade off is not seen as a trade off is for example I'm the digital minister. But my full title really is the minister of portfolio in charge of public digital innovation space and a penis really is not a ministry. It is literally just a space and it looks like this. It is a really fun like park in the central central part of the city with public art by people with Down syndrome treatment differences that are very creative. And so people from 12 different ministries stationed here from section chief level all the way to director general level and they still work with their own ministries and departments. The only thing I ask them is to work out loud and share whatever they have learned with whatever other people that may occur in that place. And I heard public official office hours there and tour Taiwan too. So all this is just to make sure that everybody know what everybody else is working on. This is not a joint budget program but this really is a joint horizontal communication program. Thank you very much. Well that was fascinating. And I think has demonstrated just how much we have to learn from around the world. And so it's been a really interesting and useful session. Can I just check that I'm not stopping anyone who would like to ask a question. Oh, I think we've explored with both Taiwan and New Zealand. I think Phil can's trying to come in. I can't see. I can't see it right. Okay. Lord Phil can just briefly fascinating sessions would love to get more detail on the innovation process described by Audrey Tang. And also as a subset of that, the insights from design thinking, I think we've got a lot to learn on that. A very quick question if it's possible to both of you. And we have. You're both talking about more open and porous forms of policy making and implementation. We still feel in the light of this crisis that it's been a central dominated process. Largely run a caricature behind traditional civil service boundaries and mechanisms. And how is the central local nexus works and has there been a participative relationship between central policy making delivery and local policy making delivery. Can I take on this. Or maybe. I mean, I'm fine. Right. So we're a well officially a transcultural republic citizens a country with 23 million people. But it's actually a quite small place. Right. Taking the high speed rails from Taipei to the south most municipality of Gaussian is just an hour and a half. And so it feels like just a slightly larger municipality when you look at geography wise. We enable the central epidemic months on to very quickly essentially towards Taiwan and look at how things really are and also share with the local municipality which plays a supportive role. And I think this is what we learn from starts because when starts 1.0 came the Taipei municipality were issuing reverse directions from the health barrier. And to VP Chen Jiren was actually the director of the health minister at a time. And so I think he learned the lessons and then the constitutional court charge the legislature to design a central command system so that anyone be their local level or central level. If they put on those, you know, jackets that our quints puts on, they automatically become part of the CCC command chain, the infrastructure. And so that it has a very clear line of report. And so the municipalities are definitely on the implementing role instead of a, you know, the possibility of issuing countering policies. That was a big problem back in 2003 and we have took legal and design and regulatory remedies to that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yes, from my and what I would comment on that is that I think we can do better between central and local government coordination. But one issue that's really come to the fore is in Auckland, which is the main entry point where most of the managed isolation facilities are. The council itself has definitely had a big business downturn so its revenue is down. Most of those cases are being managed out of Auckland and as a port of entry, it's really been one where the central and local government had to come together quite strongly. Again, being a relatively small country, the mayor is a former Labour minister, so he's he's well known to the centre so I'm sure that's helped but I think that that for us has been the main thing. For example, in the South Island, they're saying they're saying things like well, we've had really very little if any COVID and why can't we move down to level zero and be completely free to run around. So there are there are some differences I think between islands as well that have just done just working their way through. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you. Well, as I hope both witnesses recognize, we really appreciated your contribution this morning. And thank you for coming at different and unusual times for you, but we really do appreciate it and it will be very helpful to us in our future deliberations. So thank you. The committee overall will be meeting again tomorrow. And so I will see. We will pursue the work of the committee tomorrow in our more normal slot. But thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good local time. Thank you. Thank you.