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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?

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

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?

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?

Thank you for that answer, Mr Eustice. I had planned to give you chapter and verse on the committees that have taken evidence on the Subsidy Control Act 2022 and the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020, but we are very constrained for time. However, I will cite Jonnie Hall, who gave evidence to the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee at the tail end of last year. Mr Hall stated that the internal market act drove “a coach and horses” through the common frameworks. Why are you not sticking to the principles of the common frameworks?

You are constraining the Scottish Government’s ability to support agriculture through the Subsidy Control Act 2022. If we have policies that are strictly designed for Scottish issues, the UK Government can override them if it feels that the policies go against the principles of what it is trying to do down in England. Is that not correct?

The Scottish Government plans to make direct payments to farmers on the basis of food production, and up here we also have hogg and less favoured area support scheme payments. You have none of those in England. If you start being lobbied by farmers down in England who say, “This direct support is causing us problems in our marketplace,” you have the power to require the Scottish Government to take that subsidy away, do you not?

I am very glad that my colleague Jenni Minto raised the subject of the Northern Ireland protocol; we will come back to that later.

I refer back to what my colleague Dr Allan was asking you about. I genuinely get the point that you are trying to be as positive as you can be about the situation regarding the subsidy framework. I refer, however, to what has been reported to the committee for socioeconomic analysis of the European Chemicals Agency—SEAC—the Scottish Government and the House of Lords, and I would particularly like to examine the statement that has been made by a House of Lords committee. It says:

“there are powers under which the Secretary of State can refer subsidies or subsidy schemes made by the devolved Governments to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) which could potentially have the effect of overriding the devolved governments”—

and “overriding the devolved governments” is the really important bit—

“when it comes to proposing subsidies”.

Other countries have agriculture separated from any subsidy control regimes. Why has the UK Government not done that? Did you have any consultation with the Scottish Government when you were putting your proposals forward?