Ravi Gurumurthy (RG): Hello and welcome to The Mission. This is the podcast to listen to if you’re interested in mission driven innovation. My name is Ravi Gurumurthy and I’m the Chief Executive of Nesta, the innovation foundation. And on this podcast we’re going to be talking to practitioners, academics and policymakers about how to tackle society’s intractable challenges.

With me today is an old friend, Rachel Botsman, author and authority on trust, and the mission we’re going to be talking about is how we rebuild trust, what’s happened to it in an age of COVID, why does it matter more than ever before and what we can do about it.

Rachel, welcome.

Rachel Botsman (RB): Thanks, Ravi. Thanks for having me.

RG: Really good to have you on. I want to start by just talking about what has happened to trust, because there’s a long debate about whether trust has declined, and yet when you look at the actual data, for instance, the Ipsos MORI data, what I think is surprising is two things. One, that trust, particularly sort of social trust, our trust in others, has remained pretty stable in the UK, in fact it’s gone up a little bit, I think it’s at 54%. And that’s not the highest, I think the Scandinavian countries are more in their 60s, but it’s obviously not the lowest either, so it feels like social trust is relatively sort of decent and rising. And then in terms of trust in business, government, politicians, journalists, that’s terrible, really, really low figures. So I think it’s, you know, trust in politicians is really down at 14%, but it’s pretty static, it’s been chronically low for, you know, at least two decades. So how would you characterise the challenge, because I don’t think it’s quite right to say we’re in an age of distrust and lament that fact. But tell me about how you think about this.

RB: Yeah, I mean we could dive into any one of those strands, you know, business, politicians, but let’s really zoom out. Because the narrative is misleading, whether it’s in the media or in the polls, because generally when you read stuff, what you are left with the impression is that it’s a downward curve, right, in all areas of our lives trust is in a massive state of decline and that is terrible for society. And it’s far more nuanced than that. The change is really not a lack of trust, it’s where we place our trust and this is the big issue. So when people don’t know what or whom to trust, three things tend to happen. The first is we turn to each other, which is why you’re seeing that positive bump in social trust. We turn to our friends, we turn to our family, we turn to our neighbours, we turn to our employees and employers. And that’s not a bad thing, right, that’s really good for social trust. The second thing is that we then still need to place our trust in authority and leaders and information and sometimes we place that on maybe people who aren’t worthy of our trust, untrustworthy people, but are incredibly good at speaking to our emotions and our self-identity, so how we think of ourselves and who we want to be. And then the third type of trust – and this is a real problem – is when people we need to trust, so at the moment politicians and leaders, that turns to distrust. So you’ve got three very different things going on; this local form of social trust, pinning our trust maybe on untrustworthy people and sources, and then people who we need to trust we are distrusting. And that is what I see at a macro level, and then there are all kinds of patterns if you look at different institutions, whether that’s government, media, banking, education and so forth.

RG: So that’s really interesting. So your argument is that it’s not that trust disappears, it just shifts and there’s almost a finite stock of it and we move it around depending on who we’re trusting at that moment. But d’you think the data bears that out, in particular, any trends around institutional trust?

RB: Yeah, it’s not a finite amount of trust. The way- so I describe it as trust shifting, right? So I see trust like energy, it has to go somewhere, we are born to trust and that just changes form. So it’s not a lack of trust, it’s where that trust is going is what changes. Surveys, they’re important and the polls are important, but they’re clunky in the way trust is very, very hard to measure. You know, at the end of the day trust is a feeling, it’s a belief, it’s our confidence with something unknown or someone unknown. And that is one of the hardest things to measure and one of my issues with these surveys is they tend to be incredibly broad and don’t focus in enough on, you know, what are we trusting someone to do. To do what, should be the question.

RG: So let’s step in on that. I tend to agree on that in the sense that it measures a, you know, an attitude, but it doesn’t really capture behaviours.

RB: It- yeah.

RG: So if in our daily lives we’re doing things differently, that’s revealing our trust and how that’s shifted and I don’t think we’re capturing that at all in the way we research it.

RB: No, and I think that interesting research is when you track attitudes, events and behaviours. So there was a recent paper, I think it was published in ‘The Lancet’, that was all about the Cummings Effect, and it was tracking confidence in British political leaders. So right after the lockdown announcement, easing of lockdown, Cummings event, and then what happened, and how that actually changed all kinds of behaviours. And that type of stuff is really interesting, right, because you can see how one event can have a lasting impact in terms of, in this instance, people’s willingness to follow the rules and the guidelines, which depends on trust. So that’s the research I think is really important and really interesting, both in terms of us making us self-aware of how we’re responding to these events, but also thinking about interventions and solutions.

RG: I can’t believe we’ve got to Dominic Cummings already in the podcast. [Rachel laughs] We’re only like a few minutes in. But just on that, Danny Finkelstein always writes a column, probably every two years, in ‘The Times’.

RB: Two years!

RG: Basically saying that… yeah, he repeats the same- I mean he’s been a columnist for a long, long time, but he tends to write a column which says all the commentators and media tend to get incredibly obsessed and excited about the latest political shenanigans and almost over-react or assume that this even has a much bigger impact on public attitudes. And actually most normal people aren’t following that event very closely and people’s memories are relatively short term, let’s not over-exaggerate. So on something like the Cummings Effect, that feels like a good example whereby it felt like a massive thing for a few days, do they really actually have significant effect on public attitude?

RB: So first of all, I might take his approach of writing a column every two years, because I think that’s brilliant, but…

RG: On the same thing.

RB: Yeah, on the same thing. [laughs] So I get his point, but there are some events that have a lasting consequence, they leave generational scars. So, you know, if you think of Blair and weapons of mass destruction, even the MP expenses scandal and the ducks, you know, when someone expensed the house on the duck pond. And of course Andrew Wakefield’s paper that was published, you know, falsely linking vaccines, MMR, to autism. These things do have a lasting consequence and I personally believe the Cummings Effect will be very similar when we look back in history and we track what happened, I think it was, was it May 22nd, post that date in terms of the public’s attitude towards what the government were saying to try and protect us. So I don’t think in this instance it’s us actually over-reacting, I think we can’t under-estimate what that did to public confidence and public attitudes.

RG: One thing you said earlier on when you were declining the different ways in which trust morphs is that when we lose our trust in certain people we tend to rely more on emotions and identity, and d’you think that’s partly why certain politicians who are telling stories about culture and identity are more potent now than ever before, because the other ways in which politicians appeal are less effective?

RB: One hundred per cent. I mean it’s interesting, what you believe and whom you trust is actually less tied to your political affiliation and your self-identity, so it’s all tied to what kind of person am I and what kind of person do I want to be. And I think the political leaders, and even sort of the prominent advisers, they understand that better than anyone, they understand how to sort of fine-tune a message to, well, emotionally manipulate us into believing them. And that is deeply worrying when we are in a time when we need facts and we need science and we need clarity and clear advice to cut through. You want empathy, right, but you don’t want that sort of emotional undertone that can really have a huge influence on the people that we’re following, information that we’re consuming, and then ultimately how we behave, or misbehave.

RG: So when you look at the trends on politicians and trust, I think politicians are now trusted 5% less than they were a year ago, and this was measured pre-COVID so god knows what’s happened in the last six months, it’s about 14% and that’s almost the lowest figure we’ve ever had. I think it was down at 11% in the early nineties after Britain crashed out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Anyway, it’s very, very low, but it matters hugely right now, given that we are looking to politicians to make incredibly big judgement calls and instructions around what we do in our daily lives and who we see and who we don’t. And I think we’re starting to see right now a bit of a backlash against that. And I think it’s particularly important, given where we are in COVID, with the current wave we’re going to be very reliant on politicians not necessarily doing the big lockdown, the emergency measures, but carefully calibrated conducting of our behaviour, we can go to pubs, we can go to schools, but we can’t meet with more than six people. And to trust those politicians requires a big leap of faith, it requires us to believe that those are being made in our best interest and rationally. So what’s your advice on how politicians can build trust through this very, very difficult period given they’re going to have to conduct us all in our behaviour?

RB: Yeah. I think the first thing that we need to really focus on is that number, Ravi. You know, like 14%. If you think of, I always think, look at the people around you, that means less than one in five people around you actually believe the government and have faith in what they’re doing. That’s huge, that’s our lives, right? That is our lives. Public health is nothing without trust, it underpins everything. So this is more than a statistic, this is a serious health problem. The trust issues, if you look at the heart of them – and this is where, you know, if I was advising the government right now – it’s an integrity problem at its heart, so what damages trust the most is when the public no longer believes that the interests of the politician are aligned with their best interests. And that’s game over. You just tune out. You just, you turn to each other, you turn on each other and that’s what’s happening right now. And not to hang on to Cummings, but that’s what that event really did, it wasn’t just the event itself, it was the fact that Johnson kept him, right? That I need this guy, regardless of what this has done to public trust. So they need to completely do a 360 in terms of how they start demonstrating that the interests of the government, the interests of the guidelines they’re putting out are genuinely aligned with the interests of the public. And that’s tricky, right, because you’re balancing social interest, mental health interest, education interest, economic interest, it’s a really hard thing to get right. The second thing that is really hurting trust, trust is tied to expectations, when people have a feeling that they sort of know what to expect of themselves or others, that’s really good for trust. And something that really damages that is inconsistency. So when the messaging’s all over the place, whether it be around track or trace, or whatever the R rate is, or whatever the thing that we’re actually following, you know, the level system, or is it the R rate. You know, confusion and inconsistency really deteriorate into, damage trust. So they are the two problems that I would focus on, I think they’ve got integrity problems and serious inconsistency issues that are creating this level of confusion that has a knock-on effect in terms of frustration, anger, sadness even, even grief. And at the end of the day – and I can’t even believe I’m saying this – really we only have each other. You know, we have to have faith that we will all do the right thing, and that’s really hard right now. So my belief is that we actually should be moving away from sort of top-down government solutions and we should start coming up with hyper-local campaigns and local solutions where people start listening to community leaders and businesses that they do believe and they can relate to because they’re close to them. So I think we actually need a change in communications and strategy for us to have any chance in terms of communications actually driving the behaviours that we need.

RG: So one of the critical pieces of infrastructure that was built at the beginning of this crisis that hasn’t really worked was the whole attempt to sort of use an app to support test and trace, and what I thought was quite interesting about that was we had two models. We had a sort of big government model which involved a high degree of centralisation, which is what NHSX went for, and then we had the more decentralised model involving Google and Apple. And it felt like a bit of a choice between do you want big tech to run things or do you want big government, neither of which seemed particularly attractive. Do you think that trust in personal information, as we sort of try to develop more fine-grained ways of clunky lockdowns is going to be really important in the next year and are there any sort of alternative models that you see coming forward that could perhaps be commanding more public support?

RB: Yeah, I mean what a schemozzle, right? Like, from [Ravi laughs] – and there’s no other word – from start to…

RG: Great word. I haven’t heard schemozzle. [laughs]

RB: It’s the only word I can think of, right? I mean, coming back to personal information, I mean the one that really gets me is when you go into a restaurant and they hand you a clipboard, right, and then they trust that you’re going to write your name in a clear fashion and remember your phone number, or even write the right phone- my poor mum, because I forget my number, so her number is everywhere, which is a terrible thing to admit. But, you know, the fact that they couldn’t even create QR code signage where you just hold your phone against it and that would automatically track where you’ve been, and also require like multiple people in your party to do that versus taking one name. So like the design of this thing and the execution, I just, I can’t believe with all the talent and all the resources available, this is what we’ve ended up with six, seven months down the pipe. You know, even when you go- I don’t think it should be a government website, by the way, I think it should just be ‘Test UK’, right, like something really simple and when you go on there, there are two buttons: ‘at home test’ or ‘book a test’. And then you go in through those portals and maybe they ask one or two questions and you’ve either got your test coming to your home or you’re going to a local test site. I don’t know if you- have you been on one of these portals, have you tried to book a test, Ravi?

RG: I have. I have actually and it actually wasn’t too bad for me, to be completely honest.

RB: Well, so first of all, mine had ‘system error’ ten times, and then when I eventually got to the end it said, ‘Sorry, no tests available’. Went back in the evening and it told me 110 miles away. I mean that’s disgraceful in itself, but I was surprised by the amount of information I had to put in. Now, I’m someone who personally would give up that information for the sake of public safety, but I think it was about ten steps of information. It’s too much. Right, for most people, they will worry that there is now a permanent marker on them, regardless of how the test results come back or even that they got the test, so everything that has been brewing around data privacy and personal information, I think we’re underestimating the influence that’s had on the effectiveness of the track and trace. Personally, I think we needed an independent business that you pull together the very best talent and created something in a couple of months that was best-in-class technology. So I have no idea who said like let’s go to a centralised government solution, or let’s rely on Google or Apple, but right there is underestimating the importance of trust in making this thing work. And that’s what we often do, is we forget that trust underpins people’s faith or confidence to use anything.

RG: And, you know, one of the most depressing stats I think on trust was in relation to the vaccines. And it was actually quite positive, I think, for Britain, because we were near the sort of top in terms of willingness to actually get a vaccine. But you saw countries like France or the US way down and how seriously do you take that, because actually I personally think that if we did have a vaccine and we saw lots of people doing it, you would get a high degree of adoption. But yeah, what’s your reading of those stats?

RB: Yeah. I mean I learnt a lot, anyone who’s really interested in this topic, the person I have learnt the most from is Dr Heidi Larson, who runs the Vaccine Confidence Project. And I think the thing I underestimated, Ravi, was how targeted this is. So how you get within a community sort of an unproven safety scare around a vaccine and that sows seeds of doubt, and how targeted these campaigns are towards vaccines, that they will look at where there is sort of a piece of information around a safety scare on social media sites, it could be one parent group within Facebook, and then really throw information to amplify those seeds of doubt. So I think that was, I didn’t realise how sophisticated the targeting was around these communities where seeds of doubt started to appear. And what Heidi also helped me understand is that the issue isn’t just on safety, which is what we often think it’s about, it’s actually they’re going after three things: effectiveness, which is really powerful, right, will this thing work? Is this thing safe? But also, what is the value of vaccines over all the other things that we could be doing in society, and I think that’s something that is, so it’s a more nuanced issue than just vaccines aren’t unsafe, it’s how important are they and are they actually effective.

RG: And then how do we counter that? So, you know, to some extent, are there ways of detecting this information and intervening when that happens? To what extent should we be mounting counter campaigns with social reference and influential people to, you know, actually address this?

RB: Counter campaigns don’t work, they have the opposite effect and they have what they call the backfire effect. So if you have sort of an anti-vaxxer community and they’re hearing information from someone who is pro-vaccines- I always think of it as a scale, right? So if you take someone who’s maybe even a three around vaccines, so doesn’t really believe in vaccines, and then you take someone who’s a nine or a ten, and those two people talk to one another, whether it’s through campaigning or through conversation or through social media, the three or four will move down more towards a two or a one, and then the nine will move more up to a ten. So it sort of amplifies this polarisation. So the solutions actually lie in finding people that are more like a five and a six talking to a two or a three, you have to shift people along versus taking these opposite ends of the spectrum and throwing messages at each other, which only increases the divide. And, you know, this is a real issue in the way public health and campaigning works because – or even if you think of like climate change messaging – it’s sort of pro against anti and that just pushes people further and further into their corner. So, so much of this, again actually it comes down to social influence and using in the same way that the anti-vaxxers are highly sophisticated in their targeting and messaging, we have to apply the same level of sophistication and micro-targeting to actually feed the information that they will even hear and start to listen to.

RG: And that just gets me on to this question about who is the right messenger for certain COVID related issues and whether we actually need to be constructing more of a big coalition or even a national unity government, because if you’ve got a situation of deep political polarisation where people are basically not likely to listen to messages if they come from one side or another - and I don’t think we’re quite in the same state as the US is on this front, but I think we are going in the wrong direction - to what extent would it make sense at some point to try to have a, you know, a big coalition where no matter what your political affiliation this is the common message?

RB: Totally. I mean, and you would know this more, but my read is that in government in particular, but also in public health, we tend to focus on the message and not the messenger and, you know, what you are trying to really connect with is human motivations. Not what someone believes, but why do they need to believe that. And the messenger is as important as the message in really connecting with those motivations and I that’s where I think there is a lack of thought and where I would be applying a lot of energy and investment right now.

RG: So let’s get into almost who the messenger should be, because I think it’s an interesting question about whether we should have different voices who people trust more and perhaps more local voices. But before we do that, I think there is something interesting in terms of the tension between transparency and consistency, because I think when you’re in government you often see the complexity, the shades of grey, and there’s a temptation or there’s a choice you have, which is do you let the public in on that and show them that there is uncertainty and these are difficult judgment calls and on balance we’re doing this, which would be a way of potentially building trust, or does that show a sort of lack of clarity and lack of consistency. And I personally have always erred towards the former; let people in on the debate, let them see it, and that builds trust in the message when it comes out, but I think there is a good case sometimes to say look, we’ve got to make it incredibly clear so it punches through to people who are not necessarily following things very closely. So how do you see that kind of transparency versus consistency/clarity tension?

RB: Yeah, it’s a really great question. I’m against transparency in terms of what it does to trust unless you can promise two things: one, relentless transparency. You cannot be selective. So, once you go down this path and you promise the public you’re going to be transparent, you’re making a commitment that they can see everything, and I don’t think that’s a promise any government or political leader can uphold. I remember talking to Andy Haldane, who’s the Chief Economist at the Bank of England, and he says, you know, some people would think that some of the least trustworthy things he did was the information that he withheld, but that was a very conscious decision because it would have created blind panic. So I think governments get into trouble when they promise transparency and what you tend to see is it creates a little trust bump, but then it plateaus and then it actually has a negative impact on trust, because the more you share, the more people know, the more questions they have, the more they think that you’ve got hidden. So I, the person, the leader I actually think who struck this right, has got the right kind of balance between the clarity and accessibility of information, but also as you said, that people can understand it, is Angela Merkel, where she’s like, I will share things with you when we are confident in that information, but you can also have faith that I will tell you when I don’t know and I will do everything I can to seek out the information, the best science and the best data to come back with you with an answer. And I just don’t think you see that from British politicians. I think British politicians are, you know, they’d rather sort of be a buffoon or just wing it, so to speak, than admit they don’t know. And actually admitting that you don’t know but that you are going to do everything in your power to get the very best information and the very best people to solve this problem can be better for trust than pretending that you do know.

RG: I mean, exactly. If you say I don’t know about this, I don’t know about this, but I do know this…

RB: Yeah.

RG: … then you’ve also earnt a hearing and people think that that thing that you’re confident in is actually something they can believe in. If you’re confident about everything then it sort of destroys, I think, that trust that you’re trying to build.

RB: I mean trust comes from two places: capability and character, right? And Matt Hancock I really think really suffers from this problem, is that he wants to appear like he’s completely in control and then he knows everything, and then everything sounds like an excuse, right, when it goes wrong. So, I think Jacinda Ardern is another really good example [inaudible 26:58], it’s that clarity around what we do know and what we don’t know and promising openness around that, versus committing to transparency, which over the long term, particularly in a crisis, isn’t great for trust.

RG: This may be bonkers, but one question I had was whether you can actually involve the public more in deliberation about some of the difficult choices we have. So, for instance, if you assume that we’ve almost got a finite budget for interaction and we are constantly having to sort of make choices about whether to keep pubs open or schools or socialising, could you quickly, for instance, try to think with the public about how to use that budget best and what the priorities are, even if it’s as simple as conducting regular polls and then playing that polling back when you’re making decisions and saying we’ve heard what you’ve said, and you’ve said keep the schools open at all costs, even if it means shutting pubs, and that’s why we’re doing this. Because that feels like something that could potentially again build trust because it’s not a decision that’s been made arbitrarily by people without any particular consultation, but it’s something that is seemingly reflecting popular will.

RB: I don’t think it’s a bonkers idea at all. I mean I think it’s really interesting that, you know, at the start of a crisis we respond to this sort of top-down authority because we’re, you know, just tell me what to do, right? And then, but that’s not how we live our lives. You know, this idea that I wrote about shifting from institutions to distributed trust, that we make collective decisions, we participate in collective networks, we expect to have a voice and a say and so without that participation and input we’re responding in a negative way to these things that feel like very top-down clunky rules that have been imposed on us. And you have a different reaction now to then when this all began in March, so I actually think that is the way to go, that people feel like they’re being listened to, that the government cares what they think and that they are actually responding to what people think and what they want. So I don’t think it’s a bonkers idea at all, I think it’s actually the way forward because we’ve got now an engagement problem and that’s a serious issue.

RG: Yeah, I mean you talked about distributed trust and this idea that trust has moved from being very local and face-to-face many, many years ago, then we focussed on institutional trust and now we’re in an age of distributed trust where we’re sort of trusting individuals and networks. What kind of innovations in trust can you see being useful in the immediate sort of future in the next year? How can it sort of help in relation to COVID?

RB: Well I think we’ve already seen it and, you know, it’s one of those things, you know, the local neighbourhood mobilisation that happened almost sort of organically where people formed those WhatsApp groups and those support groups and said, you know, let’s not wait for a government solution or even a council solution, but let’s support the people who are isolated or vulnerable and can’t go shopping. I mean that’s, you know, I know we sort of often dismiss those examples of distributed trust because they feel sort of temporary and nice sort of neighbourly things that we can do, but it’s worth looking at, like why do people mobilise in that way and how simple the tools were that enabled that to happen and how could that then potentially apply to other problems that we’re trying to solve. So that’s what I’m interested in, is it’s not necessarily sort of the initial solution that came out of these neighbourhood groups, but what motivated people to do it and how did they do that and then how could we apply that to other problems. I don’t have, to be honest, a long list of ideas, but you can see it in everything from, you know, if we did go back to some form of lockdown and they closed the schools, how could you create local education hubs where kids could get together in small bubbles and you could share the load in terms of home schooling, like that being an obvious example. Even like how do you decentralise the testing schemozzle, right? So you’re not relying on this central government system, that you can actually find local testing centres, local labs that have been verified by people that you know and have taken a test and there’s confidence in the result. So I think it’s when we’ve got to look at things where the system at scale does not work and you need to decentralise that system and use local support structures, that’s where distributed trust can really come in.

RG: And how do you get a connection between those networks and then the figures in authority who are making judgement calls? So, to give you an example, on some WhatsApp groups that I’ve been in, everyone’s going, well, I’m not going to obey the rule of six, and quite quickly these networks can either spread fake news or cement norms that are out of kilter with what government is recommending. So I think it’s quite an interesting question for all of the different traditional institutions, how can they connect in with these networks. So I’ll give you another example, would be universities. If we think there is a big risk of transmission amongst students who are basically disobeying the rules, rather than government trying to instruct or even university heads, to what extent could they build social reference to the most, you know, connected salient students to basically spread the right message and do it that way, rather than just sort of very, very top-down.

RB: Yeah, and I think it’s really interesting that what we default to is using these networks to report people, right, to dob on them. That’s what you hear. Versus what you’re talking about is how to use basic examples of social proofing and social influence to actually change behaviour. So, just to give an example, like at my kid’s school there’s a big hoo-ha on the WhatsApp groups which I absolutely hate about parents not respecting social distancing outside the school gates and that everyone should be wearing masks at drop-off. Right, now all it takes is a critical mass of people to start wearing masks and the rest of the people will follow. We don’t need to wait for the school or the government to give us that advice. So, how do you make that happen? You find sort of the class reps, the social influencers within the school and just say please wear the mask for these reasons. So I think it’s really- and, you know, I work in a university and I’ve been talking about something similar, is the class reps often have a lot of clout amongst the university students, so how do they encourage their peers to do the right thing, versus what they may being asked to do, which is if they see inappropriate behaviour or behaviour that doesn’t follow the guidelines, to report on people. So, does that make sense? I think it’s a shift between using these networks as a reporting mechanism and using them to actually model and encourage and socially proof the behaviour that we need.

RG: Yeah, and I think there are other examples. I’m thinking of Betsy Paluck’s work on tackling bullying in school, where mobilising students, particularly the ones that are most connected and influential, can have quite significant behaviour change effects. So I think if those traditional institutions and government are prepared to let people in and collaborate more, there’s potentially quite a big benefit in terms of their ability to drive behaviour change.

RB: And I think it raises a really, you know, something I’ve been thinking about is I can’t point to many people right now in authority, but also sort of in the world of celebrity or sort of mainstream influencers, so to speak, that is having a mass positive effect. I don’t know if you can. But that to me is, so it’s not…

RG: I’ve just got Noel Gallagher in my mind at the moment.

RB: Noel Gallagher, right. Like, I mean usually what happens is a voice rises up. I mean take like David Attenborough, right, in climate change, a voice rises up that has resonance and that voice, you know, it doesn’t have a political affiliation, but who is that voice right now? That’s the worrying thing that I’m not sure we have a messenger or messengers that different age groups are responding to.

RG: What about scientists? Because almost at the beginning of the crisis I think there was a high degree of initial confidence in Chief Scientist, the Chief Medical Officer, it was quite interesting to see this government suddenly put experts in the limelight. There’s a high likelihood, given the fact that we’ve done so badly and basically messed this up, that people will be much more cynical of the messages coming from science, if you like. So how do you see that playing out and is that another big risk because we’ve lost a big source of authority potentially?

RB: One hundred per cent, I mean if we need scientists we need them now, right? And I think there’s two events that really stick in my mind. So the first being the Chief Nurse, you remember, that Johnson fired when she was speaking out very vocally about care homes and PPE. And then the other, you know, was the post-Cummings press conference where he basically silenced the two scientists by his side. And those moments are iconic, right, because we don’t know what goes on behind closed doors and so all we have to go on is his behaviour in a public press conference and if he’s telling them to be quiet in front of the media what they really think and know, does the same behaviour happen when he’s making a critical decision. So I think, again, the politicians have underestimated the optics of those moments and how those moments then carry a narrative that then deeply impacts our faith and confidence in the scientists, not necessarily to do the right thing, but actually have the influence on policy and public health that we need right now.

RG: One of my favourite trust stats and trends has been trust in the civil service. So I think 65% of people trust civil servants to tell them the truth, and that’s continued to go up, and it’s 40 percentage points up since the start of the Ipsos MORI polling in 1983. It’s the one group who’ve really actually done really well. And as a former civil servant I feel obviously very pleased with that. So I think the idea that, you know, politicians and civil servants are in tension or being sacked is problematic and potentially they could be quite a useful way of building support for the sort of COVID measures, particularly locally actually, where I think it could be particularly effective.

RB: But this is a really interesting thing, Ravi, because I don’t think now many people actually even make the separation between a politician and a civil servant and so maybe the mistake was actually having those people side by side. Maybe they should have been separate briefings and separate settings, right, so that you really felt that independence and autonomy and those people were doing their jobs. So even sort of meshing those two things has become a problem.

RG: And when it comes to us as individuals during this crisis, what can we do to foster trust in our communities and, you know, with institutions as well?

RB: Well, every conversation matters. So, you know, every conversation that we have, you know, could be around the rule of six, it could be around testing, it could be around vaccines, whatever it is, back to work, every conversation we have matters and I think it requires us to ask ourselves, you know, if we’re having a conversation that, you know, I’m not going to abide by those rules, to ask ourselves like why do we feel that way and to imagine that conversation happening in a million different homes around the country and the impact of that. So, you know, one of the things I don’t think we think about enough is you talk about trust being built, I hate that language, I always talk about trust being earnt. The politicians don’t actually control the trust, we control it, right? We decide who we give our trust to, and that has immense power. So there’s two things I think we can be doing, is one, being far more thoughtful around the people and the information that we are trusting and taking more care around that, and the second is, you know, paying more attention to not just our behaviours but the conversations we’re having and how those conversations will have a ripple effect in terms of how people behave. So, I know that’s putting the responsibility back on us, but that’s where I think really the hope lies.

RG: Rachel, it’s been fantastic talking to you about trust. I will make sure never to say building trust again. Great to have you on The Mission, thanks a lot.

RB: Thank you.

[ends]