2. Professor Lucy Yardley

PROFESSOR LUCY YARDLEY (affirmed).

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Lady Hallett: I’m sorry we’ve kept you waiting, Professor Yardley. We try not to but sometimes it happens.

Ms Cecil: Indeed, Professor Yardley, thank you for assisting the Inquiry today. I am Joanne Cecil, I’m one of the junior counsel to the Inquiry, and I will be asking you questions today.

The first thing I will ask you to do is to try to keep your voice up. There is a stenographer in the hearing room and so it may be that I ask you to take things a little bit more slowly so that she can make a note and accurately transcribe.

If you need a break, please just let us know.

Now, Professor Yardley, you produced a witness statement for the Inquiry; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: It’s dated 10 August 2023, and for the assistance of those following it’s at INQ000236376. Don’t worry so much about what’s on your screen at the moment, Professor Yardley, I can take you through it.

The first page is page 1 and it runnels to 26 pages in total with a declaration of truth. Is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That’s correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. As we can see, Professor Yardley, just to give some idea of your background, you were also a member of SPI-B; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That’s right.

Counsel Inquiry: In fact you were the co-chair, along with Professor Rubin, for a period?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That’s right.

Counsel Inquiry: I just want to deal with your professional background, just very briefly, if I may. You are a professor of health psychology at the University of Bristol and at the University of Southampton?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: You wear a number of different hats including being a senior investigator at the National Institute for Health and Care Research, and indeed you’re the behavioural science theme lead for one of the teams there; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That’s right.

Counsel Inquiry: In terms of background and its relevance in respect of the pandemic, you also participated in the earlier incarnation of SPI-B, SPI-B&C, during the swine flu pandemic in 2009 to 2010; is that …

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yes, in fact I was a member of SPI, which is the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Committee.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Turning now to the pandemic, your involvement in the pandemic response and behavioural science advice began prior to your involvement within SPI-B; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: How did that come about?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Well, I have general expertise as somebody that specialises in support for positive behaviour change in relation to health, so I pioneered a methodology called the person-based approach to developing interventions, and that involves listening very carefully to the people that the interventions are being designed for, working with them to try to find ways of helping them to do whatever behaviours it is they want to do. And because of this expertise, which has resulted in a sort of very substantial body of research, 600 papers and so on, I became the theme lead for intervention development for the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Behavioural Science and Evaluation, and that involved working closely with what was then Public Health England, and also I had a particular expertise in controlling infection transmission which dated back to the previous pandemic. I’d actually had Medical Research Council funding to develop an intervention, which we called Germ Defence, which helped people reduce the transmission of infection in the home. We actually trialled that in 20,000 people in the swine flu pandemic and it proved effective at reducing infections/transmission in the home.

So, yeah, I had both the sort of general expertise in how to positively support behaviour change but also the specific expertise in infection control.

Counsel Inquiry: So a rather unique combination.

So, looking at the outset of the pandemic, at the very beginning you were asked, back in January of 2020, to provide advice to DHSC; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: To – yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: To the DHSC?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: Department of Health and Social Care.

Following on from that, you were contacted by Professor Rubin, that’s towards the end of the month, on 26 January of 2020, and he sought to see whether you agreed it would be appropriate to approach the Department of Health to reconvene SPI-B, to put it back together for this pandemic?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: I believe you agreed?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And as a consequence of that, you subsequently became the co-chair on 12 April 2020, once it was set up?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Well, it wasn’t really a direct route from one to the other. At first I was just a SPI-B member, like all the other members, right up until just after lockdown, and then I emailed James because I thought a very urgent priority at that point was to start thinking immediately about how we could help people safely come out of lockdown. So I emailed James that topic. He took it to SAGE, and SAGE agreed it was an important and urgent topic, and so James came back and asked me to lead a paper on that. I then took that paper to SAGE and it was really that process of sort of participating in SAGE that led to me being co-opted as a co-chair.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

You remained co-chair throughout that period, is that right, until you stepped down?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: Alongside that, you also participated in SAGE?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yes. Well, it was in my role as co-chair of –

Counsel Inquiry: Indeed.

Professor Lucy Yardley: – SPI-B, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: I understand that you attended 41 SAGE meetings in total over that period –

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: – in that capacity. Thank you.

Just to get a sense of the output of SPI-B, we’ve heard a lot about its work already this morning from Professor Rubin, so I don’t seek to go over that, but can you just give a broad idea of how much assistance you provided in terms of volume, so reports, papers, advice?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Well, as James said, I think it was 96 papers that we produced, but actually our activities went way beyond that, so that – for example, I was on several related committees, I represented SPI-B on the JCVI, which is the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, when it was formed, then I was also on the Testing Initiatives Evaluation Board, we gave ad hoc advice on – you know, to individual departments if they asked for it. But I think probably the most time consuming thing of all of our work was that in order to be able to give expert advice we had to try to somehow produce the evidence for that, and we didn’t have any resources or any –

Counsel Inquiry: I’m going to bring you to that in just a moment.

Professor Lucy Yardley: Okay.

Counsel Inquiry: No, not at all, not at all. I’m going to look at some of the challenges with you, if I may, that SPI-B faced during the pandemic, and indeed resources is one of those.

So perhaps let’s go there first, in fact. So with respect to SPI-B, you had some administrative support, as I understand it, from GO-Science, but your broader concerns were effectively that there was very limited support, is that right, to either the chairs or the members in terms of that work product that you were asked to effectively advise on, and the evidence that would underlie it. Can you just explain a little bit about that, please?

Professor Lucy Yardley: It’s – really where the gap was in terms of collecting and collating the evidence that would inform our advice. So the evidence was all of the papers and even news reports that were coming out about what was happening around the world in terms of behaviour and strategies for containing the virus and how well those strategies were being implemented and accepted in different countries, and how effective they were being. And then there was – James talked about a lot of data across government, which we actually didn’t have access to a lot of it, but even if we had had, we wouldn’t actually have had the capacity to have looked through it all and collated it all. And in fact we were all aware of enormous behavioural evidence gaps, because it was an unprecedented situation. So you could look at what had happened in previous pandemics or in other related health conditions and try to draw parallels and inferences, which is what we did, but what you really needed was new research being done in real time at pace, and we all tried to do that, and in fact, you know, I had half a dozen studies at least, probably double that, probably a dozen studies that went forward during the pandemic that I initiated rapidly.

So, for example, from a qualitative study of the barriers that were faced by people on low incomes in adhering to self-isolation and how they couldn’t isolate in the home right up to massive clinical trials, so –

Counsel Inquiry: We have effectively a very broad range –

Professor Lucy Yardley: Exactly.

Counsel Inquiry: – of research and –

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yeah, and also all SPI-B members were doing that, so we were all trying to do that in our – not spare time, but to try to produce the evidence that was needed.

Counsel Inquiry: Of course. And that was very limited resource in terms of additional resource from GO-Science or the government or any other –

Professor Lucy Yardley: We didn’t have any – we had to apply for research funding, which of course added a lot of delay.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

In terms of those lack of resources, how, specifically, do you consider that impacted your ability to advise on measures within and the pandemic?

Professor Lucy Yardley: I think it was – it had a real impact. It had a direct impact in terms of we didn’t have as complete an overview of the evidence as it was coming in. It also impacted on who was able to provide the advice, and engage, because it was only people that were able to free up the time to be spending all their evenings and weekends doing this, which not everybody can, so yes, it definitely had an impact.

Counsel Inquiry: That perhaps brings me to the second area that you identify within your witness statement, which is one of diversity within SPI-B, and you’ve just alluded to some of the external pressures in respect of individuals who could give up that time or couldn’t because they had other additional caring responsibilities or whatever else it may be.

With regard to the composition of SPI-B, and certainly in the initial stages, looking back, how do you consider that to have looked in terms of diversity and was it at optimum diversity in your view?

Professor Lucy Yardley: The original diversity was limited because it was an ad hoc committee, really, that was sort of brought together at speed and somewhat informally through the people that were already aware of each others’ work in the field. Admittedly it is a very small field, as you mentioned, infection prevention in pandemics. So the people that had most expertise in that field, we were aware of them. But as the pandemic progressed, we were able to bring in a much wider group of people who didn’t necessarily have that specialist expertise but had relevant expertise, and actually scientists all over the world and all over the UK were quickly upskilling themselves in those topic areas and carrying out research, so we were actually able to bring in a much wider pool of expertise, with much more diversity in all ways by the time of the summer.

Counsel Inquiry: Just breaking that diversity down for a moment, you suggest in your statement that certainly there was a lack of diversity in expertise, that’s one area, but also in relation to the representation of vulnerable minority and, you say, marginalised groups; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: With respect to that lack of diversity, in that area, can I just ask: do you consider that the absence of those perspectives on SPI-B had an impact on the advice you were able to provide? I appreciate it’s an issue in hindsight now, but can you assist us with that?

Professor Lucy Yardley: It’s always best practice to have diversity on your research team, and in future that certainly should happen. Actually when you look at the advice that we gave, all of us, because we worked in public health, we were very aware of the differential impact of health problems and the measures that were taken to deal with them on different communities. So right from the beginning we were actually drawing attention to that, first as a risk and then, as it emerged, as something that was actually happening. And, you know, I was myself rapidly instigating research, reaching out and talking to communities that were affected, and so were other people on SPI-B.

So I think it probably didn’t have a very bad influence on us. I think what was more of a problem was that – I mean, James put it very well this morning, that it’s not possible for any scientific team to represent all the sectors of the population, with all of their diversity, all their different circumstances. And that’s why you really need excellent sort of community representation, so that all of the guidance that you’re thinking about and all the recommendations you’re making, you can involve members of the community that do have that broader representation, including representing people that don’t have PhDs, which is important.

Counsel Inquiry: It’s an additional way of drawing in some diverse experiences into the work that you were undertaking.

Certainly one of your recommendations within your witness statement is that in the future there should be a pre-existing register, essentially, of individuals with expertise in this area that can be drawn upon, and that should be refreshed?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yes, but that’s only half of it. That’s the kind of expert bit, but what I also recommend is that there should be a pre-existing infrastructure that is – allows for that – the expert – experts and indeed the policymakers, to be involving a very wide, diverse sector of the community and especially people that are seldom heard and underrepresented, so that their voices and their concerns and the difficulties that they face will be taken into account right from the earliest stages of developing guidance.

Counsel Inquiry: And that perhaps feeds into one of your key messages in relation to behavioural science itself, is a message or theme of co-production, essentially, with those individuals with lived experience or from the communities that are being focused or targeted by those behavioural changes?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Absolutely, yep.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, the next topic I wish to move to with you, and you’ve touched upon it briefly already, is about the commissioning of advice from government or SAGE or indeed other departments within government to SPI-B.

If I can summarise it this way: my understanding is that the role of SPI-B was effectively to answer those questions either posed by SAGE, which had in turn responded to government questions, or those that came directly from government but through, effectively, GO-Science as a conduit?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That’s right, that was written into our terms of reference.

Counsel Inquiry: You describe that within your statement as being an arm’s length, top-down process. What did you mean by that?

Professor Lucy Yardley: What I meant was that we never had any direct communication with the people that were asking for our views. Of course we did – as a co-chair, I did sit on SAGE, so when SAGE was asking us questions I did have an understanding of that, but we didn’t have an understanding of what the policymakers were considering or what their views were of our advice. So because it was arm’s length like that, there was a lack of dialogue and I think a – therefore, a lack of understanding about exactly why questions were being asked, what the options were that were being considered, and why that was, and probably a lack of understanding the other way, that we weren’t able to explain as – as clearly as might be possible about why we were giving the advice we were.

Counsel Inquiry: One aspect that you deal with within your witness statement, and perhaps I can just bring that up briefly, on page 10, paragraph 5.3, is clarity in commissions from government. I’m just waiting for that to come up at the moment. But what you say there – perhaps I can read it to you while we wait – is that:

“Sometimes delay was incurred if questions from government needed to be clarified or modified because we felt they were not formulated in the most helpful way. When this occurred, it usually seemed to reflect an unsophisticated understanding of human behaviour, and policymakers were open to our revisions.”

So where you flagged those concerns back, were you able to get a more refined commission coming back to you?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yes, I mean, we usually suggested ourselves the refinements we thought were necessary that would make it a meaningful question that we could use behavioural science to answer.

Counsel Inquiry: Overall, you’ve described it as effectively a reactive committee as opposed to a proactive committee because it was reliant on those commissions coming in from government and being framed by government; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Well, that is the way that it was set up initially, and I would say certainly until the end of March that was the way we seemed to operate, mainly. Towards the end of March and from the beginning of April, we sort of pushed back about – against that a bit. That’s when we started saying, you know, can we make suggestions ourselves, can we – do we have to answer questions if we don’t think they’re the right questions? And we got clarification that actually we could ask questions ourselves as long as we got them approved, and we could push back and not waste our time on questions that we thought were inappropriate.

Counsel Inquiry: Indeed. Just going back to, in fact, an email that you, I believe, referenced at the outset of your evidence, that’s at INQ000188924.

What we see here is an email between you and Professor Rubin, and it’s a little bit cumbersome, isn’t it, but I’m just going to take it from the bottom, because that’s how we read through them, and you’re explaining that:

“[You] know that SPI-B tends to be reactive but in terms of horizon scanning [you] would just like to suggest that now is the time to prepare very actively the measures and messages to be employed when the aim is to slightly relax controls …”

And you explain:

“… or we could end up in an undesirable situation of having a bounce back risky behaviour as soon as the extreme lockdown measures are eased, and having to re-impose them unnecessarily.”

If I can just then take you to the reply at the top, what we see is Professor Rubin endorsing this, effectively, and saying “this is an extremely good point (as ever) from [you]”, but it’s really the last line of his email, which is:

“Could we advise you [so this is obviously SAGE] to ask us for advice on that?”

So, as I say, it’s all a bit circular, isn’t it, in that respect? You’re putting in a bid and saying “Could you please advise us on these issues”?

Professor Lucy Yardley: It certainly was cumbersome. To be perfectly honest, we were starting work on a paper on that anyway, and it takes time to write a paper, so by the time they said “Yes, definitely”, we had at least had a chance to make a start on the paper.

Counsel Inquiry: Well, that’s good news then at least.

So we can take that down now, please.

The other aspect that I wish to ask you about in respect of commissioning is the feedback. We’ve heard it certainly referred to by Professor Rubin as being a “black hole”, your advice would go off, you wouldn’t know what had happened to it. What were the consequences of that in terms of your work and your ability to produce that advice and work?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Well, it didn’t put us off trying to feed the black hole. I mean, we were still keen to produce good advice and to publish it, and although we didn’t get specific feedback often about how it was received, sometimes you could just see signs that some of it had been received and been acted on, or that that’s probably what had happened, because, you know, sometimes what the government either did or said did seem to be concordant with what we’d advised. Of course they might have done that anyway, but it felt sometimes as if it was landing.

But, yes, obviously it would have been helpful if we’d known both when it was helpful but also when and why it wasn’t helpful, because if we’d understood better what the barriers were for the government, you know, that’s our specialist expertise, helping people overcome barriers, so, you know, we could have worked more constructively to work with those barriers.

Counsel Inquiry: Indeed, and improve the advice and the output from SPI-B.

The other aspect in relation to SPI-B was its relationship with other bodies in terms of the work it was undertaking. We know from what Professor Rubin has already said there were a number of different organisations dealing with communications, for example, that you were working with, either based in the Cabinet Office, Number 10, government departments, and alongside that you were also working with SPI-M-O and other subcommittees in relation to SAGE; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, we heard a little bit about behavioural fatigue and effectively what other individuals were expecting in terms of behaviour from the population, or from people in general. I just want to ask you a little bit about an email exchange that you were involved in with Professor Woolhouse – so SPI-M-O – who we’ve heard from earlier this week.

And it is INQ000103469, please.

What we have here, at the very outset at the bottom, is you’ve provided a summary of SPI-B proposals for consideration. We then have above it the reply from Professor Woolhouse thanking you, but explaining here that:

“SPI-M keeps ending up speculating that if you lift one restriction then people will be less diligent about observing the others. Not sure if that’s anything more than speculation.”

So what we’re seeing here are assumptions within other committees and subcommittees of SAGE about behaviour by people and populations; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That’s what Mark’s saying. Obviously I wasn’t there, so –

Counsel Inquiry: Of course.

Professor Lucy Yardley: – you know, this isn’t – hearsay from Mark to –

Counsel Inquiry: No, no, of course, but what you do explain then quite clearly in your reply is you say:

“No problem – I don’t think there is any evidence for changing one regulation undermining adherence to other regulations but that is exactly why we advocate trialling a very small behaviour change when safe to do so!”

You continue then to just comment on epidemiologists and their views of people’s behaviour and what can be expected from them, and you say:

“I find epidemiologists tend to underestimate to which what people will do is malleable and can be influenced by how things are introduced and supported.”

What formed your view in relation to your comments regarding epidemiologists and their understanding?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That’s because I do actually work with epidemiologists quite a bit, and I did during the pandemic and – you know, both in my research and sometimes I attended SPI-M meetings, and I had a very good relationship with them. But it comes back to the issue that was being discussed this morning about predicting behaviour versus changing behaviour, and epidemiologists are always trying to build models that predict, so they tend to ask the question: what are people going to do?

And I’m a behaviour change specialist, so my question is: how can we support people to do a certain thing, and how will the context of the support they have and the circumstances they’re in and the messaging and so on influence that?

So quite often I would find that the epidemiologists would be asking the question: will the, you know, people adhere to this? And my answer would be: well, it depends on how it’s presented, how it’s supported, what barriers they face, and so on.

Counsel Inquiry: It’s not a straightforward single answer. Thank you.

I now want to move, if I may, to two very specific areas, one certainly that you were asked to conduct some work on and a separate issue that arose during the pandemic, and that is one of airborne transmission and the communication of risk.

Was the issue of airborne transmission and risk communication ever dealt with by SPI-B?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Oh, very much so, but not mainly by SPI-B on its own, because that would be very much a matter for other groups. So, for example, I co-authored papers with the Environmental Modelling Group on transmission in various situations, and NERVTAG would have had, you know, input into this kind of thing, because the extent to which transmission was airborne and the ways in which it was airborne weren’t very well understood at the start of the pandemic. Obviously it was assumed there was airborne transmission, but how important that route was wasn’t known.

Counsel Inquiry: May I just interrupt just to ask you a very specific question. In fact it’s been suggested by, and I’m sure you’ll be very familiar with, Professor Noakes, who is the chair of the Environmental Modelling Group, EMG, that one of the reasons as to why airborne transmission was not made clearer at the outset of the pandemic to the population was because of the fear of public reaction.

Now, is that something that SPI-B could have assisted on in advising with respect to communication, and –

Professor Lucy Yardley: I’ve never heard that hypothesis, and I never heard that hypothesis at the time, I’d never heard anybody talk about airborne transmission being potentially a more scary mode and that we shouldn’t talk about it. So I don’t recognise that at all.

Counsel Inquiry: But is it something that SPI-B could have assisted on if asked to advise on that specific issue in relation to minimising public fear?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Oh, absolutely, if there had been any concern about minimising public fear of airborne transmission, yes, that – we could certainly have advised on that.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

The second aspect is one that you’ve briefly mentioned earlier in relation to papers produced by SPI-B, and that’s adherence to self-isolation. Now, very early on in the pandemic, SPI-B advised on measures to assist in adherence to self-isolation, and one of those aspects was financial support; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That’s right.

Counsel Inquiry: At what point did you consider financial support to be important? So at what point did that issue become apparent to you in terms of the pandemic?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Right from the very first paper we wrote on the topic. And this is what I meant about because we’re public health researchers we’re aware of inequalities and structural reasons why some sectors of the population may be more vulnerable to infection and may be less able to carry out the things that – needed to reduce that risk.

So one of the things that we were immediately aware of was that the policies for self-isolation, because there wasn’t sort of financial support for it, would make it – if you were depending on an income, make it very, very difficult to do.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. In terms of the recommendations that you made, this was actually a recommendation where you did get some feedback; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: From Sir Patrick Vallance, and what was that feedback?

Professor Lucy Yardley: The feedback was that there was strong push-back from the government that they didn’t want to provide financial support.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, we know that subsequently, at a later point in the year, in September of 2020, some measures were introduced in relation to grants for those on Universal Credit. Did you and members of SPI-B consider that to be an adequate response at that time or did the problems continue?

Professor Lucy Yardley: No, we didn’t consider it adequate and we continued to push throughout the pandemic for better financial support, because we had good evidence that people were finding it very difficult to access the support, that it was very limited, lots of people didn’t qualify for it, people didn’t know that they could qualify for it, they couldn’t access it quickly enough, and so on.

Counsel Inquiry: Indeed, in November of 2020 a further paper was produced entitled “Increasing rates of self-isolation” by SPI-B, and in respect of that paper one of the conclusions there was that motivation to self-isolate was high in all groups, so across all demographics; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That’s right, yeah.

Counsel Inquiry: But the ability to self-isolate was the lowest among the poorest sections of the population?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That’s right, yep.

Counsel Inquiry: So what impact does that have on adherence rates?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Well, it meant that the people that had the lowest incomes were less able to self-isolate. Both because of financial problems, also because, for example, in their homes they often had less space to isolate between household members and stop infection spreading within the home as well.

Counsel Inquiry: Is that problem one which you consider the UK solved at any point during the pandemic?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Not at all. And it’s something that we pointed out over and over again right from April to the end of – well, before, before lockdown we pointed out that this would be a problem, and we continued to point it out throughout.

Counsel Inquiry: Now, the final area I would like to ask you some questions about, Professor, is that of government messaging, and we’ve heard already that SPI-B set up a separate communications subgroup, and we have also heard a little bit this morning from Professor Rubin, as you know, about the terms of reference and why it was called SPI-B and not SPI-B&C, albeit some of that work continued, in fact a significant proportion of SPI-B’s work continued in relation to communications; is that fair?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That’s right.

Counsel Inquiry: Various documents were produced for the assistance of the government. I’m not going to take you through those because you’ve set them all out very helpfully within your witness statement, and within that you also set out that you provided offers of help to all government departments, checklists of how to develop good communications and sets of examples as to how slogans could be developed; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: With respect to those core principles in messaging – and I’m summarising here, so please forgive me because it will not do justice to the very broad set of papers that were produced, but the core principles were surrounding clarity, co-production, which you’ve already spoken about, and indeed we’ve heard evidence from others in relation to that, messages drawing on protecting each other and standing together, societal and – messages in that respect, avoiding fear, disgust or authoritarian messages, and then using rewards and enablement as opposed to punishment and shame; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yes, I mean, there’s quite a few other principles as well.

Counsel Inquiry: Indeed. No, I appreciate that, but these are just drawing out, as I say, the sort of headline principles, if I may.

Now, the government campaigns varied from very short campaigns, “Hands, Face, Space” campaigns, all the way through to the more dramatic imagery that we subsequently saw at points in the pandemic, and I will ask you in a moment about some of those individual campaigns, but before we go to that, in a general sense what are your views, in high summary form, of how and whether – sorry, whether government behavioural strategies were communicated and implemented within those campaigns.

Were they broadly successful or were there real problems?

Professor Lucy Yardley: I think there was a fundamental problem in the sense that the strategy seemed to be based on issuing rules and using fairly brief slogans, and the rules kept changing, and the reasons why they were introduced and why they were changed were not fully explained, and people were not given enough education about the pandemic and how we could all manage it best, to really understand why things were introduced and why they were changed.

So at the beginning of the pandemic, when we had to lock down, a simple slogan was appropriate. But what I and other SPI-B members, the communication people, everyone, was advising was that in order to come out of that, the general public needed a much more detailed understanding of how infection spreads, how we all have to work together to keep it under control, and how, if we did that, it would reduce the need for the severe lockdowns and all the harms that came with that.

So all the way through, people sort of had this idea of these rules that were getting in the way of what they wanted to do, whereas if – and then we ended up with lockdowns which really did seriously harm everybody’s activities. And what we needed to do was to harness the willingness that the public had, which we knew that the public had, to try to keep the infection under control, and to educate everybody better about how you do that by carrying out activities more safely, so that you don’t have to lock down. And it’s that sort of more nuanced, complex, co-operative way of co-producing the solutions to the problem of infection control that we were advising, and the sort of top-down changing slogans was just a fundamentally different way of approaching it.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Now, I just want to deal very briefly with your involvement in terms of SPI-B’s involvement with messaging and communications and the difficulties and challenges that were faced at points in the pandemic.

We’ve heard a little bit today about issues in April and May of 2020, and to put it in context this was when the government slogan had just changed from “Stay home” to, effectively, “stay alert, control the virus and save lives”, “stay alert” being the primary aspect that I’m interested in.

Now, several of the members of your committee considered that was very poor messaging; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: So that triggered an email chain following on from that when news came that that was going to be the next change.

Can I just call that up, please. It’s INQ000197167, and can I go to page 10 of that very briefly.

On page 10 what we see at the very top is an agenda, just to put it into context, this is an agenda, we’re looking at paragraph 6 there, and it’s a “Release of documents and SPI-B support”. And if we go then to page 8, please, we see a message from – I’m going to summarise it if I may, as opposed to go through it all, but we see a message from Professor Michie asking that that item be brought higher up the agenda because they’ve been – she’s been informed about this new messaging. She continues to state:

“I sincerely hope that this is incorrect as it goes against several principles we have rehearsed many times in our advice to SAGE/Government …”

It continues:

“If it turns out to be true, it would be helpful to understand why we were not consulted given we have a bespoke Communications group and have been raising the problem of Government communications for several weeks …”

Then if I can go, please, to page 7, there is some support that takes place there from Professor Reicher, Stephen Reicher.

Go to page 6, please, and we see a proposal from a Professor Marteau, and her proposal is that Professor Rubin writes to the chair of SAGE documenting those concerns in the hope of intervention. But as we go then to page 5, please, we see a link, and it’s a link to a tweet, and Professor Rubin saying “That ship has sailed”, the tweet is already out, the message has already gone.

We then get a reaction on page 4 from Professor Michie, which begins to say:

“Oh gosh, [Prime Minister] communication to the nation by Twitter is now in the UK …”

Professor Reicher:

“We have learnt so much from Donald Trump… But seriously, I think it would still be helpful for James to write such a message now and I think it is all the more important we discuss [it] …”

Then we get to your intervention at page 3, which is really one looking for some calm heads to some extent, because albeit we have a large – we can see a large number of emails on the screen, there are significant, it’s a very significant and wide email distribution list, and it’s gone to all sorts of different government departments, including the Cabinet Office and Number 10; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Mm-hm.

Counsel Inquiry: You explain you don’t think it’s:

“… a particularly good slogan but [you] don’t think you can have a behaviourally specific slogan given how many behaviours there are …”

That’s your more nuanced point, presumably.

“… the tweet … [specifies] several of them … lots of advice we have given that hasn’t/probably won’t be followed, not sure I would pick a fight on the messaging myself.”

Then if we can go to pages 1 to 2 – sorry, page 2, I think it’s page 2 in the initial instance – page 1, my apologies, because it goes over the page – and go down to the bottom, we see an intervention from an official in the Cabinet Office, and what she says there is:

“I am happy to bring in some thoughts on Monday as well. I tried to understand how much the next phase of this kind of messaging can be more supported by SPI-B (or at least make sure the decisions are made having seen advice). The messages in this instance are kept so elusive by a small group of mainly No10 advisers – these are agencies that have won their political campaigns and are now supporting this one too. My team was never consulted either and as soon as I heard the message I flagged our concerns which mirror those of the group – only to be told it was too late now (and ‘it tested well’ which often means a shut down of discussion of any risks!)”

Then going over the page, please:

“… bottom line … they won’t change, they won’t change the message now. Flagging concern is probably not wrong but I think it would be better to explore how to work with them next time.”

In short. She continues to say:

“… I am so sorry that despite being the behavioural scientists inside the government communications service we don’t have a handle on this either. It’s so often partially political and in this case I was also told they wanted to keep it deliberately small so that there’s not too many cooks which is also a cultural issue.”

That email chain perhaps explains some of the challenges that indeed different groups involved in communications were having at that time; is that a fair assessment?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Absolutely, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Indeed, subsequently to that, if I can just move to a different email chain at INQ000197166, and that’s page 2, we see an email there from Professor Rubin in the middle, it’s the one that I’m looking at, and references there a call from Patrick Vallance and that was about the email chain to express concern about SAGE getting drawn into a government operational move and losing its reputation as a result.

He also confirms that he has had “another call from a person in the know to say that Number 10 is concerned about [the] correspondence on this”, and he says “presumably because we cc’d half of [government] into it”.

So were these challenges that continued then throughout the course of the pandemic or did things improve?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Things didn’t improve in terms of being consulted usually about messaging. I mean, we were consulted occasionally by Cabinet Office, so, for example, they did come to us to ask about how to message in the autumn. They phrased it as to prevent pandemic fatigue, but we managed to talk instead about sustaining adherence to the needed measures.

But on the whole, the communications tended to go ahead with very little input from SPI-B, even though we were very happy to advise. And as James mentioned, we actually did, in almost every paper we wrote, give some advice on how communications around a particular topic could be done well.

Counsel Inquiry: I’m now going to ask you just to look at just a couple of specific messages, if I may, and images that went out with them.

You’ve already dealt with some of the issues that are concerning the stay alert progression, effectively, and we’ve seen them actually through the email chain that we’ve just worked through, so I’m not going to take you to that one, but can I take you, please, to the “Stay home, Stay safe, Save lives”.

That’s at INQ000309556.

It’s an image here:

“You’re not stuck at home, you’re safe at home.

“Stay home, Protect the NHS, Save lives.”

In short form, what is your view of that in terms of effective communication by the government?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That’s interesting. That particular one I haven’t seen before. And at the very start of the lockdown, if that’s when this is from, we actually didn’t feel there was a problem with that kind of simple messaging, because we felt that people needed that clarity, they needed to understand the urgency, and it actually did have the desired effect, which was to make everybody feel that everybody was in it together, and that people understood why staying at home would benefit everybody.

Counsel Inquiry: Just to pick up on that for a moment, and I understand what you’re saying about clarity of messaging, this specific campaign has been criticised by organisations concerned with women and children facing domestic abuse or harms, hidden harms in the home. Do you see any difficulty with this and whether a more nuanced approach was also needed?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Well, this is exactly why my own methodology for developing messaging, I would always have co-produced it with a wide range of the kind – of the people that it was aimed at.

Having said that, that might have happened, and I don’t know who produced it, and maybe they did test it with people and found that it was actually not causing any kinds of concerns. And to be perfectly honest, I had my own reservations about the “Protect the NHS” part of the slogan, because we know that during lockdown and through the pandemic generally there was underuse of the NHS by people who – whose health suffered or some people died because they weren’t using the NHS sufficiently. Now, part of that may have been because of a realistic fear of infection, but part of it might – I think part of it probably was that people felt they shouldn’t use the NHS because we’re trying to protect it and so – you know, I’m completely speculating but, you know, I would have –

Counsel Inquiry: You don’t need to –

Professor Lucy Yardley: – tested that message to check that every aspect of it was working as it should with all different types of people.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

A completely different one now, the freedom day slogan. You explain in your witness statement that may have reduced adherence to social distancing earlier than would otherwise be the case, and certainly than was ideal, and certainly at a point when it was prior to people being vaccinated effectively; is that right?

Professor Lucy Yardley: That wasn’t the freedom day slogan, it was the Eat Out to Help Out slogan. Freedom day came after vaccination so was less of a problem, but the Eat Out to Help Out slogan, yes, that came at a really crucially problematic time, because it was during the summer and that was when – it was a really missed opportunity, that was when the infections were low and we could have all hopefully kept them low if everybody had understood how to resume activities safely, and had understood that only if we did that would we be able to avoid or minimise the need for further lockdowns.

Instead, the Eat Out to Help Out scheme made people think that it was safe and that actually it was your duty to meet people and that wasn’t going to lead to more infection spread. And we had warned back in April that, for example, if things were done for economic reasons, people would feel that they should be able to do them for social and psychological reasons, so that, you know, if to help out small businesses we could eat together, then to help out our family we should be able to eat with them.

So, you know –

Counsel Inquiry: The –

Professor Lucy Yardley: – to draw those wider conclusions.

Counsel Inquiry: Then finally, if I can just ask you about this one, it’s a slogan that came out in August of 2020 into September of 2020, and it’s “Don’t kill granny”. It’s a slogan that was repeated by the chief executive of various – of Preston city council, directors of public health, and indeed on 7 September Matt Hancock saying “Don’t kill your gran by catching coronavirus and passing it on”. Is that an appropriate form of messaging, from a SPI-B perspective?

Professor Lucy Yardley: Again, unless I’d actually pre-tested it with the target young people I couldn’t say for sure but my instinct would be probably not because it is – it is trying to draw on fear and shame, and actually a lot of the reasons why infections were being transmitted from younger people to vulnerable older people was not due to people not caring if their granny died or, you know, being reckless, it was due to people not understanding the way that network, social networks interlock, so they didn’t realise that if they, for example, hugged a friend who was their age, that friend might nevertheless be living with somebody who was vulnerable, and so – I actually saw some much, much better messaging on the same topic during the pandemic where it showed sort of three young people meeting, and it showed the hidden links that each of them had to vulnerable people, so that even though it looked like three people that were not vulnerable meeting, actually they were all connected to vulnerable people. That was a much better one. And that kind of messaging, it doesn’t blame people, it doesn’t suggest they’re recklessly endangering people, it educates them about risks that they didn’t even understand that they needed to manage.

Ms Cecil: Thank you, Professor Yardley.

My Lady, those are all the questions that I have. Does your Ladyship have any questions?

Lady Hallett: No, I have no more questions. Thank you very much indeed for your help, Professor Yardley, very grateful.

The Witness: Thank you very much.

(The witness withdrew)

Lady Hallett: Mr Keith, do you want me to take the break now, or …

Mr Keith: As my Lady pleases.

Lady Hallett: It’s not quite time. It’s up to you.

Mr Keith: Shall we crack on with the next witness?

Lady Hallett: Okay.

Mr Keith: Professor Sir Peter Horby, please.