 Gwynhau, dyma yw Joe Adatungi, ydym yn ymwneud yn ymddiadol ar y cymdeithasol. Ddwy'n ddig yn ddweud o'r ffordd i chi'n gweithio'r Gweithbeth ond ymddiadol yma yn ystod y cymdeithasol. Rydym yn ymddiadol ar y gyfer y cyfnodau cyllidol ymwybod i'ch gwirioneddol. Yn ymddiadol yma, yna yn ymddiadol ar y cwrinio amgylcheddau yn ymddangos gyda'r pan deillogol. Mae'r proses o gyrfa swydd yn ei ddweud i gyrwyr yn Gweithio, i gyrch chi'n gweld mai'r cyffredd iddyn nhw, a i gyrwyr ar y cyntaf yn ei ddweud hi gael yn eu bod yn meddwl Chwil eifeth gennych eich banyddio ar y front yn uned However Roedd fel i robynu'r gwahodd o'r gyrwyr yn eich beth o'r ymweld i'r annid ymddeithasol wedi gyrwyr ar gyfer ymddangosiaeth. Diolch yn ydyn'r ffyrloedd o'r cyfans, yr unrhyw o ddweudau, ac y children caf bizion ar y peir i'n mynd yn y rhoi meddwl i'r mod a'r holl. Yn wych ar y nesaf y tro-際nt ffordd o fydag y sydd ym Mhwyffyr ym Mhwyffyr mewn lŵr o'r polystiad sydd wedi bod yn wneud o hyn yn ystod y 2020. Mae'n mynd i ddarparu i'r mod yn cael ei ystyried mewn ysgol. Y pandem nhw mi chi jod wedi cael eu gwestiynau yn cefnid y dda, ond yn ymgyrch ar gyfer ymgyrch a'u papach, maen nhw ddim yn ymgyrch gennym eich dda â'r hynny. Rydych chi'n gweithio i'r bwysig ac yn beth sydd y gallwn ymgyrch. Yn ymgyrch ymgyrch ymgyrch ymlaen o'r blaen o'r blaen o'r bwysig, ymdgriff hwyl yn gweithio amser. A dyna'r cerddau o'r reisarchu erioed yn gweithio ein diagnosiad, mae ei wneud cyfnodau o'r cyfnodau sydd cyfnodau? ymgyrch ymgyrch ymdeg yma yn deudio ar y cyflodau ac yn ymgyrch gyfrwyng yng Nghymru, This is the first of a series of webinars bringing together academics, policymakers and wider thinkers to discuss how best to tackle the lasting impacts in areas such as mental health and wellbeing, education, online life, housing and care, with particular emphasis on the communities that have been hardest hit by the virus. For this first webinar on some of these wider questions, I'm joined by Sir Jeff Mulgan, rhai i'r ddechreu Llywodraeth Pwysigol Gweithgaredd, Gweithio Gweithgaredd, Llywodraeth Pwyllgorol i Llywodraeth Ieil. Heitann Shnol, Gweithgaredd Ynno, yn gweithio newid yng Nghymru sydd wedi'i gwneud y gweithio cyllidol ar gyfer COVID-19, wedyn bod yma'r Gweithgareddol Rhaid Ieilol, a'r Deyrd Rheinon, Mae Pwysigol Gweithgaredd, ym Gweithgaredd Ulster, oedd yma'r gwirioneddol i'r meddwlol, ddafyn o ddweud o bobl, o bobl i'r holl mwyaf. Felly, mae'r cwestiynau efallai o ddim yn ychydig o'r panel, ddim yn gweithio eich gwleiddiadau, a dwi'n rwy'n gweithio i gyd yn gweithio eich gwleiddiadau. Rwy'n gweithio ar y panlissau i amlwg a ddweud gan gweithio'r gwleiddiadau. Felly, rwy'n gweithio'r cwestiynau i ddim yn gweithio'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Roedd yn fwy wneud o bwysigol yn ysgwrs gyda fy nghydrygiad. worst to the biggest misconception to you, and shall I go to you Geoff first of all? I think the biggest sort of striking feature the last 12 months is that, although in some respect we were all affected by it we were all affected by the lockdowns, the whole world was hit by this pandemic as never before Felly, mae gweithio'r ddealing o'r hyn nôl yn bryd. Mae'r dweud o grannu gynnig. Mae'r dweud o'r g innodd â'u hynny o fan hynny sicrhau mae'r ddweud o hollwch chi, mae'r ddealol i'r ganddyn nhw ddweud o'r clas, mae'r dweud o'r dweud o gynnig o'r marchfyrwyr newydd yma, mae'n aeth o'r eu cinnes yn ei ddiwedd. Mae o'r dweud o'r dweud o'r gynnal hefyd. Others use very different from those without the effects on people with strong social support, very different from those without. My more and more we are going to see in the year ahead the uneven scarring effects. Those inequalities of effects will be crucial in terms of what we do next. I think there is also a remarkably uneven story globally. Although the pandemic did hit in every country in the world the responses have been very different, Mae'r wneud o holl gwyb boilerot, a cychwyn i'r gŴwysig yw'r de 마�l gyda'r aethau gwneud yn bwysig, o croes i gŴwysig oherwydd yr hyn yn ddod erbyn. Felly dyna'r unrhyw unrhyw gwneud o'r pethau yn eu leision i'r symud, oherwydd yw y gael yr ysbryd, oherwydd yw yw'r diodd sydd anodd ychydig yn adeg yw yw ein reddefnyddion a'r bwrdd yma ar y Chondgoedd. Heli, roi wedi'n gwneud. Yr ymerdd ar y blaen i dri? agri with Jeff. I mean, if I was summing it up and talking about misconceptions, I've had a penny for every time I heard on the radio that we're all in this together. We clearly weren't all in this together. Perhaps we were all in the same boat but we were facing a very different storm, and I think as you talk to people, as you listen to reports, as you look to research, that just became more and more obvious. ond maith gwrtho'r tyffydd fel graedau gyda'r pandemachion erbyn ddichrau allan i gyfnodd cyffredinol, ac mae'r bwysigau sydd y gallai cyfwlad.barth roi, unig i gyd. Rydych i'r hollent yn dynnu'r maith eu ddaethol i gwymmud, i ddechrau a'r FINAN. Mae'r hyn o'r ddechrau ddechrau? Mae'r endynu gweld y gallai hwnnau meddwl. Mae'r gwrthoedd, mae'r gweithio'r hyn, mae'r hynod oedd yn hynny'n gweithio, There were some people who didn't really know who to turn to, couldn't access information. And a massive issue here was the idea of digital access and digital poverty. So you heard stories about people being furlulled working from home. Actually quite enjoying the experience and having time with their families, and finding that they could see opportunities in this. But other people who were in the front line going out to work under severe stress, a realisation that our health and social care workers were facing Postermatic stress from what they were facing, what they were dealing with, and the worries that they had about taking that home. Another big issue, particularly as someone who kept teaching online, teaching in university, is what our young people were facing and the difficulties that they found around this pandemic. So again, this idea that when we talked in the media about isolation and loneliness, generally the perception was this older person living in a rural community who perhaps had lost their partner and had been moved away from social connections. But the reality is it was very much about our young people and how they were impacted by this. So I think a total misconception when we talked about isolation and loneliness was this idea that it would be automatically older people. The reality was it was very much younger people who were concerned about their future, concerned about their prospects, the long term impact and the impact that it had on their mental health. I think the big irony that became very clear was although our young people are more connected than they've ever been, you'll know that you never see them unless they're on gadgets, they're sitting on the internet, they're connected to their friends. Yet these very same people are talking about loneliness, isolation and despair and how they are managing to cope with those feelings. At the same time, there's a narrative that's saying COVID-19 is about older people. So the message to them is that they need to have resilience, they need to be able to cope with it. They cannot be an added burden on the NHS. So I think the two big misconceptions for me is that we're all in this together. And secondly, that those ideas about social isolation are not necessarily about older people, but surprisingly more about our younger population. And I suppose thirdly, the misconception around that we are a broadly equal society, this pandemic has highlighted in short relief the inequalities that exist in our society. Yeah, I think that the idea that all of us have had quite a different experience of COVID is quite clear, isn't it? Hatton, what's your... Yeah, I have to violently agree, I'm afraid, with everything that's just been said and it's hard being the last person to speak on this, but I think this is the misconception that it's very easy to think, even if we try and justify it to ourselves that that's not the case, that others' experience of the pandemic has been like mine. You just can't shake yourself as it were in your own experience and we've all been bubbled up. So it's even harder to meet with other people and kind of get a sense of what else is going on. But people like us who are tuning in to a kind of zoom call in the middle of the day to find out about the social impact of the pandemic are typically middle-class people, professionals who've been able to work from home and so on. And what's really important is that therefore we don't design our response to the social impact of the pandemic around our own experiences, that of in a sense the kind of white middle-class male professional, because that's not where the issues lie as it were. But getting out of our headspace to do that is really quite difficult. And just building on what Deirdre was just saying about young people, I think that is probably the other misconception that I think we still, many of us carry around an image of young people through the media being the kind of rule breakers, the ones that kind of weren't complying. Whereas actually the story of this pandemic in terms of the impact on young people is just terrible that the mental health effects on 16 to 24-year-olds have been higher than on any other group. The job losses, I think two-thirds of the job losses that have happened have been for the under 25-year-olds. And those are typically the sort of first jobs which give them the skills and the confidence to sort of move up the ladder. And in educational terms, we all know that young people have lost somewhere between half a year and a year's worth of education despite the best efforts of their teachers. And these effects will last for a very, very long time. And of course, they were leased at risk of the virus itself. So, there's something about the intergenerational compact which I think is quite important to explore. Yeah. I think reporting by journalists and experts like on the conversations has been really important because people can be in their silos and it's almost like you don't see some of the impacts that are happening to people on the ground or just around because you're inside. So, I'll go to the next question to Hetan. So, you've published this review, which is great and quite timely for us. Can you tell us a bit more about this and what the findings were, how you designed it? Sure. So, Sir Patrick Valence, the Government's Chief Scientific Advisor, asked us about six months ago as the British Academy, the UK's National Academy for Humanities and Social Sciences, what are the long-term social impacts of the pandemic, which is a short question but actually a brutal one. But we were pleased to oppose that question because, of course, up until then the pandemic had largely been framed as a health crisis and our view was that it was, of course, much more than that, a social, economic and cultural crisis as well. So, we spent the last six months pulling together all of the data that was out there and really trying to map out what were the effects as well as holding workshops with experts taking evidence from all sorts of organisations and groups and so on. And we've mapped from this nine long-term impacts, social impacts, of the pandemic. And we've called the review the COVID decade because our argument is that the economic, social, cultural effects will cast a very long shadow and they'll be with us for the next ten years or more. Some of the things that come out of the review we've already touched on in terms of the impact on inequalities, on young people and so on, some other areas which we've not touched upon. One is the whole civil society agenda, so the importance of local community and social infrastructure. So, how important it was that community organisations were responding to the crisis, supporting one another and supporting people very close to home. There's the impact on urban centres, which I think is going to be a really big question if it's common place now that many of us are working from home. None of us quite know what it's going to look like when we move back to being able to go back to offices. Will that happen or will that not? And the impacts that we might foresee in terms of transport and city centres and so on. And then our evidence review is accompanied by a further review outlining a whole series of policy options about how policy makers might respond. And the key point there is that the impacts have been broad and interconnected and therefore so must be the responses. So, we talk about working at multiple levels, including investment in education and skills, in particular further education, dealing with digital divides, building up social infrastructure as I was just talking about in terms of the impact on civil society and reviewing the welfare system. Great, thank you. And obviously we're sort of pushed for time today, but the link has just appeared for anyone who wants to kind of look a bit more deeply into that. Thanks, Hetan. And just sort of coming back to you, I mean you sort of think that we have to deal with a number of issues at once, that it's not easy to just say let's deal with that and then the next one and then the next one. So, I think the sort of political buy-in is obviously quite a big challenge. How do you kind of feel about that? I mean, with the report being commissioned by it was, do you sort of feel that the government is thinking in that way and policy makers are thinking in that way? I think that's a great question. And if you look back over past public health crises and so on, sometimes they have been moments for change, but other times they have not. So, if you look back to World War II and the creation of the welfare state and the NHS and that was a moment, if you compare it for example, to 19th century cholera, where there was a moment of change of creation of a public health board, but lack of public support and therefore that dwindled away. So, I think you're right that we need political support at a high level for this to happen. One interesting thing is that we, I sat on a commission for the think tank demos, which was looking at the public attitudes towards change post pandemic and that signals that there is a groundswell of public opinion and support for the sorts of things that our review came up with in terms of recommendations in a quite separate way from building up from the evidence, as it were. So, that suggests there's public support for certain change, not just flipping back to how life was. In terms of the policy interest, there's certainly been policy interest. We talked to senior civil servants before the report was published and there was some hunger for that. My concern in a sense is that there is just sheer exhaustion in the civil service and a kind of lack of bandwidth given everything else that is going on. It's partly why we structured our review as we did to sort of talk about, here are some policy options to help you think about the kind of mid-range issue, but it remains to be seen how far these ideas will be taken up. The final thing I would say, though, is that we're not reliant on policy makers alone. If you look back over the pandemic, what was really striking was that it wasn't just government, it was civil society, even business, stepping up to the plate and saying how do we respond to the crisis that we face. A key thing that we argue for is maintaining that sense of common purpose between different sectors of society and all of us working in tune to deal with some of these long-term social impacts. Great, thank you. Jeff, if I come to you, I think we can diagnose some of these new and existing problems, but what sort of actions do we now need to take and what work are you doing to identify some of these? Ippo, which is the international public policy observatory, in a way is there to help those rather stressed out decision makers that it was just talking about and to give them the best available knowledge about what their options are, what the evidence says, what can be done, and it's supported by the Economic and Social Research Council and draws on, first of all, a sort of network globally of chief scientists all over the world and with the help of the Blavatnik School at Oxford, we track the policies in over 100 countries in fields like education and mental health, see what they're doing, what's working, what isn't working, try to distill the best available evidence, including on some of those uneven impacts we were talking about earlier, and then distill that into recommendations for very hard-pressed decision makers. We have partners in Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh, and we work a lot with local government as well as UK and England to help them make better decisions through this later stages of the crisis and the recovery. Just to give you a flavour of the issues we've been looking at, one of the first was this whole issue of mental health and school children, lots of evidence about how hard hit many have been, rising levels of anxiety, lost confidence and so on, so we try to see what does the evidence say about what can be done about that, either by schools or health services or parents and so on, and we've particularly been looking at what could be done this summer in terms of a kind of reset giving kids a chance, not just to catch up academically, but as important to catch up in terms of fun or socialising or arts or sports, and we'll very shortly be publishing some proposals on that. We'd be looking at issues like homelessness, one of the weird things about homelessness was that at the beginning of the pandemic, all over the world, governments moved very fast to get people off the streets into safe hostels and so on, and that of course raises a question, well maybe long term we could be much more effective in dealing with street homelessness as well, and then also looking at issues such as care, so just last week we had a session on again the mental wellbeing of older people in care homes, many of them have been essentially stuck in their room for a year, many without much contact with friends or family, often feeling pretty depressed, pretty lonely, pretty disconnected and so again we've been looking at what does the evidence say about what can be done to raise their spirits, make them feel more engaged, more alive and as luckily and most of nearly all are now vaccinated, what can be done in the next few months to catch up a little bit in terms of mental wellbeing, and there's a whole long list of really the policy challenges being dealt with by governments in real time at the moment, and our job is to help them make better decisions but based on good research evidence. So can we can we kind of look to things that were happening before COVID so I think with homelessness I think you've mentioned Finland before, things that have been done around universal basic income, are they things that we can kind of take and look at applying now in this new context? Well there are many sort of long-standing policy questions which have more focus because of the crisis so Finland is an example which committed to eliminating all homelessness by 2027 so there's interesting things we can learn from countries like that in terms of where we go after the crisis, as you say all over the world there's been an extraordinary flowering of experiment in welfare with versions of universal basic income introduced all over the world and often quite surprising effects on things like well-being and jobs and I think any of those will be taken forward into life after the pandemic and then in a way we've also been seeing you know real-time experiments forced by necessity so like the shift to online education one of the things we're looking at right now is what might schools want to do differently after next September hopefully when the pandemic is largely over will they just go back to where they were before or are there some elements of online tuition and assessment and peer support which might actually be quite good for future schooling systems just as in the NHS it'd be very surprising if all primary care GP consultations went back to being face-to-face and we didn't use much more video and other tools and just as online working is unlikely to go away completely I suspect even all those office workers will they may be going back three days a week to the office but they'll probably be doing you know one or two days a week at home there'll be things where probably the pandemic offers some quite interesting and useful lessons about how we might do things better in the future and part of our task is to make sense of this say extraordinarily it's always messy chaotic year of experiment and action under duress and make sense of what works what can be done what do we want to take forward into the future yeah great okay um so dear drey um you're based in northern Ireland um and you've done a lot of work in sort of social and social care sector um is is as a as a kind of area of a sector that's been quite impacted by this i mean do you do you is it seen as is covered seen as an opportunity for change well i think we have to see it as an opportunity for change so people have been talking about changing social care in northern Ireland for the past decade with very little in terms of results COVID-19 has certainly brought social care to the top of the public policy agenda in northern Ireland people are realising what what does social care actually mean what might it mean for me and what decisions do we need to make around social care and i suppose it's highlighting the difference that exists between social care and the NHS and how we address those differences it it lets us address some issues that hitherto struggled i think to get some sort of space in terms of public policy and public policy discussions um social care has been historically overshadowed by the NHS by this shiny system if you like that was free at the point of delivery stop people on the street and ask them what the NHS is and of course they can explain to you what it is and what it means to them and why it's the jewel in the crown why when we talk about constitutional issues we almost always refer to the NHS in northern Ireland but stop those same people and ask them to explain social care and it's much more difficult to ask for them they're not quite sure does it does it relate to adults does it relate to children who pass for it when do you get it is it means tested um and i think an interesting point that has come through as part of the discussions around social care is when the health secretary in england stood up bizarrely i thought in the middle of a pandemic and said he was thinking about reorganising health and social care again in england that he brought into the spotlight the notion of an integrated service integrated health and social care and of course we have for long years rehearsed to suppose benefits of an integrated system that is that there would be a one-stop shop that you wouldn't have this fragmented system there would be a seamless system of care for people going from hospitals into social care i think many policy makers in northern Ireland had a rise smile in their face as we sometimes have when we thought ourselves well we've had this system since 1973 it's been subject to very little research and many um stereotypes and misconceptions largely due to a lack of really systematic research but the research that we have carried out in northern Ireland suggests that even when you have structural integration which is what we have that the problems of health and social care don't go away they don't magically disappear and that won't be a panacea for social care so for example in northern Ireland health has remained dominant um the best way to explain it might be if you're in a hospital and there's blood on the carpet are you going to be surprised that social care budgets are going to be plundered to address those immediate issues if cuts have to happen to budgets then invariably it's those social care budgets that suffer the cuts now all of that is counterintuitive we've argued this for many years that in fact it would be much more sensible to put money into social care and ensure that we had a properly funded sustainable system but we absolutely do not so what this pandemic has brought to before again is how we view social care differently from health care how it is very much the poor relation um how in terms of care homes that they were almost an afterthought in terms of dealing with the the pandemic the difficulties around PPE the difficulties around staff working in those care homes actually being able to access sick pay for example it took until June for the department to agree that they would be entitled to sick pay um and the view that the workforce in those care homes were undervalued underpaid in fact many struggling to have a basic minimum wage yet on the other hand we were having this discussion to say look how much we value our health care workers clock for carers um but in the end the two things seem to be not making sense to each other so we could have this rhetoric about how valuable social care workers were but the reality uh was somewhat different so what the pandemic has highlighted is that we have major systemic issues in social care and we can't shy away from them anymore we need to have that discussion to say what is care going to look like what do we want quality care to look like how can we ensure that we have a system that is sustainable can we professionalize the workforce and how can we ensure that social care is equally valued to health care so i think the pandemic has drawn all those lessons to the fore and people are now much more interested in that whole social care debate and a better understanding of how it's funded and could it be the case that we're actually going to have to talk about an insurance system to pay for social care and of course finally then it is brought to the fore again the discussions between the public sector and the private sector the vast majority of our care homes in northern Ireland are delivered by the private sector and what are the issues there in terms of quality in terms of regulation in terms of cost in terms of postcode libraries availability of services and how do we want that relationship to develop into the future so in voxpops the majority of people say that they would like their social care delivered by the state are we going to actually be able to deliver that or what model of care can we develop that will meet all the criteria that we now know about yeah and the national audit office had a report out last week that had said that you know the lack of social care strategy had left the system weakened because of covid um so that's an interesting report to also have a look at um so i mean Deirdre you've done a lot of work on cross border health um do you think covid is a good sort of case study for how we work better together oh well i don't know i don't know about a good case study but it's certainly an interesting case study on cross border health so again i suppose if i had a penny for every time one of our politicians said covid respects no borders and you know there are no boundaries to covid i think well what is this pandemic has highlighted that even in the face of a global emergency in northern ireland we couldn't get our act together and get past our constitutional differences our identities to really come up with a comprehensive strategy that would work as an all island strategy it might be somewhat ironic to say that we could do it and we did do it for foot and months disease so when it came to animal health we were able to set aside our constitutional differences and say this is what is best for the island but when it came to public health we were simply unable to do it so we have as you know we have an unusual form of government in northern ireland quite a fragile and volatile system of government with a five party executive but led by the dup in shin fame so invariably the dup looked to england for their responses and shin fame looked to the republic of ireland and what we ended up was a mishmash not something that could be in any way described as an all island strategy so to give you an example of that so today if i went five miles to the border to dunigall to try to go to the republic of ireland i would be stopped by the guards and they would ask me what am i doing and why would i be crossing the border and unless it's for work purposes i would be sent back home there isn't the reciprocation so people can freely move from the south into the north and we know now that there are difference in terms of vaccinations on the rollout of vaccinations and that no level does it make any policy sense not to say that we should have been able to set aside our differences and have an all island strategy we are after all a fairly small island with a relatively small population and i suppose inevitably we look at new zealand and we say well look what they've managed look how they were able to control their borders have an agreed vision and a great strategy which is based on really meaningful cooperation data sharing and evidence of sharing best practice i think there has been some disney amongst particularly epidemiologists that in northern ireland we just simply couldn't get our act together and develop that strategy and actually think of ourselves as one epidemiological unit but also that we would have an all island approach that actually was meaningful so i think it is it's highlighted some of the difficulties but on the other hand i think it has reignited the research interest in cross border health and a realisation that there are many areas of health care that it doesn't matter what side of the border you're sitting on and one of those in particular would be public health and also a realisation that public health in terms of our health service and our health policy has been allowed to drop in terms of importance and that we did away with things that we now realise were important like directors of public health and that we really need to push an agenda which is based around prevention so in all areas of health policy across the island we talk the talk of prevention but there's very little evidence that we're willing to invest in health care prevention so issues around obesity issues around mental health issues that we could be dealing with on an all island basis why would the messages need to be different on both parts of the island so i think it has raised some very interesting political issues around working across borders and not just north south but also east west and how we are managing those relationships as well i have to say post Brexit sometimes it's exhausting me from northern island because we seem to be forever in the eye of a political storm that doesn't seem to have any sign of disappearing with the northern island protocol as leaving the european union and dealing with the pandemic i think that the sort of if you add in all the tensions between central and local government as well you know inside different nations it's you know something that i think we kind of need to look at going forward as well so jeff over to you so i mean what lessons can we learn or are we starting to learn from the uk and the world that we can we could implement i mean we talked about finland um and homelessness um but what do we kind of know about online working maybe cities well we're still in a fluid period we're in the third wave in some countries some countries which appeared to be doing well 10 months ago aren't doing so well now so the lessons won't be clear i think for a little while all the lessons there is one very striking pattern i'm not sure we can act on that and that is that countries led by a woman seem to have a death rate about six times lower than ones led by man that may or may not count as evidence but i think there are some very clear lessons about the organisation of government quite in some ways boring issues one of which you just mentioned the uk has turned out to have very weak systems for collaboration between the different tiers of government uk devolved nations and local government and others have had much better systems for them working together what i would call mesh governance i think that is something which has to be fixed it was in the british academy report some of the best performing countries in the last few last year in east asia in particular have very sophisticated ways of organising data and intelligence often working with business and civil society in ways which i think was a generation ahead of what we've got here in the uk for all sorts of reasons we did used to have pretty good risk management risk preparedness but for many reasons austerity brexit our sort of civil service capacity was hollowed out and so we had much weaker capacities to cope with this shock but also right now for other future shocks like my major cyber security attacks which is the probably the next one on the list of major risks so i hope we will be humble enough to learn from other countries which probably have better machineries in place than we do and then i think there is as you say a whole series of specific policy areas from homelessness to new kinds of welfare new kinds of business support where we will learn i think one of the most important issues in the rest of this year will be the question of jobs and skills because we are likely to see a real turbulence in the rest of this year not just in the uk but elsewhere in terms of unemployment we've seen whole sectors like retail rapidly shrinking because of the pandemic we've seen this dramatic cut in jobs for under 25s which has had unsaid is really bad for starting off on your career and again our systems of adult skills support and help for people to get to a better job a better skills to navigate their future these are relatively weak compared to the best in the world the scandinavians for example or germany and i think it's a topic we're working on in ipo we've got a session next month on this how can we help the millions who face really severe challenges to cope and one other effect here and again this is a global phenomenon is because of all the social distancing rules in the last year investment in automation and artificial intelligence has accelerated dramatically even faster therefore displacing all sorts of jobs in offices in retail in wholesale etc and therefore making even more of a priority for every country to help people plan ahead to be ready for those areas where hopefully there will be jobs growth in the future our problem in a way as a couple of you have said is that many of the decision makers are really exhausted after a year of this and their band with their headspace for thinking ahead is limited and yet we have very strong polling evidence in the uk and around the world that the public really want leaders to use this crisis for a big reset for dealing with the fundamental challenges of society which have been revealed by the crisis the challenges of inequality climate change and so on they don't want very modest incremental steps they don't want to return to business as usual but it's not yet clear whether we've quite got the leadership capable of doing that great thank you um so heads and what new ways of doing things have you seen um in the course of your your recent research well i think um you know one of the things about pan the pandemic is a certain positive uh slivers of light which we might build upon uh let me pick out uh three one is the importance of the local uh and that's come out in many different ways in a sense we've many of us have reengaged with local communities i was talking earlier about the importance of local community support uh and you know the trust in government uh national national government trust sort of rose for a bit but has dropped back down again to sort of normal levels whereas uh trust in local government has remained higher than that in uh national government so there's a sense in which local government has seen to be uh better in in many respects in terms of handling the pandemic including things like for example the centralized track and trace system which didn't work very well and had to then turn to local operators and local government which worked much better because they they knew their patch if they phoned you up they might be speaking with a local accent people were more likely to kind of listen and more recently we've heard about the measures to deal with vaccine hesitancy which again are very much based upon people understanding their very local community it might be ethnic minority communities for example there's the one jain project which is doing work for the jain community and it's it's by you know my mum listening to somebody from our community is much more likely to care about what they have to say so i think that that that sort of the local and the civil society local is one strength to build upon a second is uh i think what uh jeff had just been talking about in terms of the digital uh so we have shown that it's possible to do new things that includes the working from home but it also looks at uh public service delivery uh GP schools and so on so how is society going to reshape around that so that we can make the most of it uh what one thing that's on my mind at the moment a very practical sense of running an organisation is it's fine when we're all 100% remote working to be doing zoom calls all day etc it's going to be quite annoying when some some people are in the office and some are not how are we going to kind of switch to that hybrid way of working do we need Tuesday days to be marked as national zoom day so everyone knows that's a day when you're not going to try and aim for physical meetings we do we need new standards which sort of uh might evolve in this space and then finally uh there's something about the way that government changed its behaviour during the pandemic i mean we saw the the kind of rush around vaccines which led to new ways of doing science but there's also something about how government involved experts much more effectively it became much more porous i think can we can we maintain some of that uh going out of the pandemic that sense of using external expertise linking up datasets but actually allowing academics access to that i think has been very powerful uh and you know let's not just close back down and go back to business as normal okay thanks etan um so jeff i mean what what what areas of research are we really behind on well quite a lot but it may be just to emphasise two which i think have really been highlighted by the pandemic i mean first of all to to echo what Deirdre said you compare our health system with our care system our health system has a lot of data what are measurements loads of evidence very high status lots of voice lots of influence lots of public understanding whereas care really has none of those we don't collect very much data or which what data is collected is kept within often private operators there's almost no orchestration of the evidence it has very little voice uh in uh at the high levels of politics or indeed in in the media and this really is one reason why our system just doesn't work very well and i think is where we need in some ways both much better research and a new political settlement around care most of us on this call may well end up in care so we we all have a a a a stake in this and i think the same is true around mental health i think there has been a big shift in the pandemic in really the way we talk about mental health for the first time perhaps ever the office of national statistics data on anxiety are on the evening news we are talking about loneliness and and so on and that's that's good that is progress but it really highlights the huge imbalance again in resources and status and understanding between physical health and mental health and one symptom of that is what's been happening to different occupational groups we've had some research showing perhaps half of all intensive care unit workers have suffered some severe trauma in the last year severe depression severe problems and probably the same is true quite a few other occupational groups we just don't have the data to know and we don't really have a sort of public debate about what kinds of occupation work experiences are essentially quite toxic for the individuals involved so again i think that's going to be where we need both much more research and much more strategic policy action as well than we've had in in the past now lots of other areas but those would just be two word highlight um so i think we'll just uh heard some questions now because we've had a few that have been really good um Megan asks how can we ensure a gender equal recovery from COVID-19 given the black slide we've seen since the pandemic began Jeff would you like to have a go at that one well i think with all all of the different inequalities of COVID and we've been doing quite a lot of work trying to almost map the different multiple dimensions of inequality it's important to be quite precise so on gender there undoubtedly have been all sorts of new imbalances i think particularly because of the shift to homeworking and homeschooling and looking after kids particularly perhaps parents with very young children and that in some ways points to very specific responses in relation to support and childcare and etc but the the patterns are very complex and i would really sort of guard against oversweeping generalizations because the big message of this crisis is is complex in many ways intersectional inequalities which are key and therefore require much more fine-grained responses and this is something i say in the next few months we are working very hard on with ipo both understanding the unevenness the inequalities gender race class place etc but also where we can turn that into our specific policy recommendations if you've got really good ideas on that megan do please share them with us but i think that the key test is they have to be sharply enough defined that you could turn them into a policy action which would really make a difference in terms of a measurable imbalance or inequality i mean there are other ones some one of the questions mentioned domestic violence and here of course there has been a spike through through the crisis not just in the uk perhaps inevitably both in relation to men being violent to women but also in relation to abuse of children and hopefully this is another in a sense push for us as a society to take those issues much more seriously to make them even more part of mainstream policing practice to make sure the law really is playing its role in ways it doesn't always do so that that kind of violence becomes unacceptable and there we really do need probably simply rapid action now and in the aftermath of the crisis thank you um james asks how should programmes like universal credit change after the pandemic to better support people on low incomes um hetan have you got thoughts on that one it's a complex area and we didn't get into the details of how to change the welfare system uh in our report but i think uh that there have been some uh clear inadequacies around the system in particular for the self-employed so i think that there are going to be lessons which come out of all of this i mean taking a step back what one of the issues across all of these policy agendas is uh you know what are the costs and how are we going to pay for them and it's worth saying the pandemic has made us worse off as a country uh so not just as individuals but you know the finances of the uk are likely hit as a result of the pandemic and so it makes the kind of manoeuvre for paying for these things much more difficult as well which is why jeff's point about where you target i think is very very important um one of the things that i personally think is quite attractive you know there's always this debate about uh universal versus targeted uh welfare payments but i think looking at universal public services as part of your welfare package is very very important which is why the conversation today about uh you know the nhs but also social care is very very important one thing uh which might respond to the kind of previous question about gender is also thinking about nurseries as well and childcare support systems so these are things which if you have high levels of provision across the piece they raise the game for everybody and therefore your your need then to draw down on welfare payments may be uh lessen as a result great thank you um dear dreary i know you you definitely think we need to have um better conversations and new conversations about aging how we age and how we cared for um but you also mentioned um at the start the sort of the impact on younger people so um matt asks has enough been done to recognise and mitigate the impact on children well i think we're beginning to understand it if we look at the the whole issue of mental health for example um in northern Ireland we just uh had a mental health framework and the consultation on that is closed but that has been a long time coming and we have been doing research for the last decade looking at mental health in schools and how do we address mental health issues within schools and are we equipped to do it and what we find is the physical health is on the national curriculum but mental health isn't so children don't have the skills to self-regulate they don't have the ability to to understand resilience um they don't have the knowledge about brain development teachers also and i mean i think universities and colleges have also got to look at this where we looked at teacher training and found that across a four-year degree teachers may have had something like 10 hours on mental well-being so the question is is our schooling system fit for purpose are we dealing with issues in an appropriate manner we found here in northern Ireland in terms of mental health as i say it's not on the national curriculum what we found was some schools were addressing it some schools were not addressing it and some schools were actually addressing it in a very counterproductive way so fragmented no sense of how this should be delivered what good practice would look like and we seem to be increasingly fixated with league tables around numbers of GCSEs etc etc but very little about the school in terms of its holistic ability to ensure that our children have the resilience and the skills to deal with the future and i think that opens up a wider conversation about our curriculum within schools to what extent have we really changed the curriculum and made it fit for purpose so i think there really is a big issue about children at the other end of the spectrum that has been mentioned i think we have to ask ourselves is this a watershed moment for social care can we ensure that it's a watershed moment for social care or will it just drop off the agenda as as it's happened in the past i think we have the public have got to say we want this to change we don't want to see those issues occurring again and within that and and the watershed moment for social care discussion will be around the professionalization how to fund it what standards do we expect because essentially we are living 30 years longer that we did at the inception of the welfare state but we haven't really thought about in any strategic way how we deliver services how we ensure that people age well age successfully whatever those terms mean so i think a big issue in terms of policy here will be a focus on prevention and the last thing i would say is i think when we talk about young people and young people's mental health what the pandemic has also revealed is some fairly brutal home truths about how we are as a society in terms of ageism and what it has revealed about ageism and how the media has dealt with older people in terms of their vulnerabilities and how they seem to be less important than other members of society and is there systemic ageism and if there is what are we going to do about it and what what are the impacts of ageism on intergenerational solidarity so it it's not just the impact of ageism on the older person but also the impact on society and i think that is something that i hope again will not drop off the agenda and just like for example racism is no longer acceptable i hope we get to the stage where we're really saying well that is ageist and we we've got to address it and recognize it and ensure that it doesn't happen great thank you um james asks uh says the panel talked about how trust in decision makers has been adversely affected by the pandemic do we need to re-envision the way decisions are made um jeff yes i think we do and maybe i could link that to what Deirdre was just talking about so if you take this issue that young people have generally had to pay a high price for the pandemic even though they weren't that much threatened by covid-19 they've lost out on school and jobs and fun um and now are facing this weird situation now that half the population has been vaccinated where there may be some kind of vaccine passport for the vaccinated elderly who will be able to travel and go to pubs or whatever and they won't be able to i think that's exactly the kind of moment when we need to explore new kinds of it's almost mini social contract where there is something given to young people there is some reward which recognizes the sacrifices they already have made and will make in the future but i think that kind of deal is best designed not just from a minister dreaming it up but from some kind of process like what ireland did with citizens assemblers where you bring you know a random group of the public old and young together to talk about what is fair what's reasonable because we risked this really strange situation where either we won't have any vaccine passports because it's thought to be unfair that anyone should be freer unless everyone can be and and yet we're not actually give it and yet we're not going to give any rewards for the to young people what they've suffered i think the public will be able to work out pretty good solutions and trusted solutions to those kind of problems now um and probably again we should be using the pandemic as a way to really enrich our democracy in ways we probably should have done anyway like a really interesting um hetan uh what kind of policies do you think could work to help limit the social impacts of covid well so i think that that one was particularly actually about long covid and that's actually quite a difficult question to answer so i'm going to largely pass on that um i mean the the the social impacts of the pandemic and the things that we've been talking about one of the interesting questions that did catch my eye in the chat is uh what what will get lost and throw chucked into the long grass because we've been giving a long wish list as it were being a bit realistic about where we see the kind of opportunities for change and my worry in a sense is that some of the immediate things will get done so i'm sure that we will see programs of support for young people around lost learning and so on you know uh that i think is sort of very clearly in the minds of policymakers right now social care there's a chance i think that it will be tackled finally uh it has been put off so many times but that there has been kind of commitment recommitment recommitment and uh you know the prime minister has sort of pledged to put something out in the next month or so so let's see but that there feels like there's finally a chance that that might happen but i think some of the more subtle things and some of the more long-standing things so in terms of the subtle things that the kinds of things jeff was talking about in terms of the way in which we make decisions um our report talks about you know the multi-level governance so what where are decisions best made how do you use data at the local level we're a very very centralised country what i was talking about earlier in terms of the bringing in of expertise from external sources and also from business and civil society it's not clear to me that there's been anything that has really going to you know after having opened up government a little bit because of the emergency i feel like it's closing back down again i hope that doesn't happen but i feel it will um and then i think some of the longer term things you know one in three children uh lived in poverty pre-pandemic that that that that was the latest data which came out last week but it was essentially in line with uh the the the data for the last decade or so um we hadn't cracked that in more benign circumstances i don't see where the momentum is going to come from right now to to to really tackle that head on all right thank you i do have an interesting point earlier though um when we talked about the cost of this and how society has borne the cost of the the pandemic but i do think that we have to be careful and i say this with all due respect as my son's an economist and when you speak to economists they talk about the cost of everything and it's in a very narrow prism that they're looking about the cost i think people now are starting to think about the cost of not doing things and the social costs of not doing things so for example you know in terms of policy we we know that it's a good idea to invest in prevention or what the americans call upstream we are very poor here at doing that so when we talk about our national health service really what we have is a national illness service with very little focus on prevention very little focus on self management of issues empowering people actually rather than looking at the symptoms of what is happening to someone actually giving them the ability to say you have the tools to change giving them the self belief so i think a change in terms of policy interventions could be very important in this area as i talked about in terms of giving children the ability to develop their resilience i think the public may be ahead of politicians in many ways here because there is huge public support for addressing the area particularly of mental health but also in terms of social care but it also then raises other issues about our devolved settlement so for example health and social care is fully devolved to northern ireland but we know that we simply couldn't make the changes that are required for example in terms of social care that requires a national settlement where there is an agreement about how the system is going to work because we simply couldn't raise the money and quite honestly i don't think we could deal with how we would get an agreement in such a huge area so whilst it is devolved i think it has raised questions about what are still national questions in that area and i think in terms of a long term social care settlement that is going to deal with many of the issues that we've rehearsed here then i think it will have impact on devolution and indeed multilateral governance thank you um so i think we're going to have to wrap up there thank you very much to all the guests and for everyone else for joining us um do you have a look at all the references and links and and sign up for newsletters um and thank you for joining us thank you enjoy the sunshine