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Thank you. I will move on from there.

Under what circumstances would the Scottish Government consider it appropriate to make use of exceptions in relation to the two-dog rule? What circumstances would constitute “serious damage” to livestock, woodlands or crops, and under what circumstances would it be appropriate to use the exception for “protecting human health” and “preventing the spread of disease”? Basically, why would there be exceptions? What would be the grounds for exceptions? Can you give us a broad outline of what you are trying to achieve there?

I think that I understand what the bill is trying to do there. There will be people who try to circumvent the law. If some of them say, “We’re going to this bit over here and we’ll have two dogs,” and the others say, “Well, we’ll go to that bit over there, and we’ll have two dogs,” they might say that they just happened to get together, but they would be deliberately trying to circumvent the law. Is that what the bill is trying to prevent from happening?

Thanks very much to the panel for turning up. I have to say that when I started reading all this, I thought of a band in the 1980s that I loved called The Jam. One of the lines in their song, “Going Underground”, is:

“You choose your leaders and place your trust”.

That, to me, is probably the most fundamental thing. If we do not trust those who are leading us—if we do not trust their leadership—none of the other nuances that we talk about will matter. I could be completely wrong in saying that, and I would be interested to hear your views, but we have a bit of a dichotomy. First, we need that trust, but we have science working at pace trying to keep up with something that we do not understand; we have a public message going out trying to get people to change their entire way of life; and, at the same time, we have leaders saying, “Bear with us, because we don’t quite know what we’re doing yet.”

Given what we have just been through, how do we pull all that together and make it fit? We know that another emergency will come, so, very simply, how do we do that?

Public ownership of the media.

I refer to my original question to the previous panel. SciBeh’s evidence states:

“The key challenges of communicating public health messages during the pandemic relate to maintaining public knowledge of and trust in quickly changing information and combating misinformation.”

It goes on to say:

“Underpinning the evidence and recommendations in this statement is the critical role of public trust in institutions during a crisis. It is important to bear in mind how to tackle any challenges while maintaining public trust in health authorities and governments.”

Trust, quality and value are the things that are highlighted. I therefore come back to the point that I made earlier: none of what we are talking about matters if the public do not trust what they are getting. This is now becoming politicised. Right at the start of the pandemic it was not; there were no political arguments about it. However, it is now politicised: we might sit in the chamber or in this committee, and it gets political.

We currently have a breach of trust in the UK Government because of the Prime Minister. I am genuinely not trying to make this political, but we are not out of the pandemic—there are still things happening and there could still be another variant—so, given the situation that we are in, how do we regain the level of trust that we had at the start of the pandemic? Everything else that we are talking about is utterly irrelevant if the public do not trust what we are telling them.

Tracey Brown said that the science that fed into the policy was restricted by the questions that politicians asked of scientists. This might be a question for Dr Phin. With regard to the whole trust issue, if I were a conspiracy theorist, hearing that would make me ask, “Are the politicians only asking the questions that they want the answers to?” Is it factually correct that scientists answer only the questions that politicians put to them and in the way that politicians put them?

Let me stop you there for a wee second. I am going to go back to what you and Will Moy said earlier. When we have an information gap, that is when other stuff can seep in. There is a time gap too. We have information and we tell people that we are working on it and that they should stop living and stay at home to let us work it out. In the meantime, someone else comes along and feeds in other, damaging, information.

I promise that I will be very quick, convener. My question is for Dr Phin. As a sheep farmer, I can say that our experience with foot-and-mouth meant that, this time around, everything shut—it stopped moving. If we have another pandemic coming, what would your advice be?

Let us assume that it is a pandemic where we do not know the outcomes or how many people it is going to kill. If we go back to that same scenario, what would your advice be on day 1?

It does. Will Moy, do you want to come in?