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Just as you do not want to downplay the importance of flu planning, I do not want to downplay the importance of pandemic planning in isolation, but how does such planning integrate with a wider approach—what has been described as a whole-system approach—to emergency planning? Planning for a pandemic is very important, but it has to be seen as part of our wider understanding of how the country responds to emergencies.

Will that be specifically for health?

Good morning to our witnesses. I will briefly pick up on one of Sandesh Gulhane’s points before I move on to my own questions about the relationship with the US. One of the things that the US Administration is threatening to do is prohibit publicly funded researchers from publishing in respected peer-reviewed journals and potentially to set up alternative journals that look as though they would be guided by the ideology of politicians who have been known to promote conspiracy theories and debunked science. If that happens—if that threat is realised—would you agree that there is a need to re-evaluate US agencies as partners?

That brings us on to my final question. One of the flaws that were identified with the 2011 influenza preparedness strategy was the lack of an economic and social dimension to it. That covers a great deal that is non-medical and not specific to a health pandemic but still very relevant to a health pandemic, and it would have been relevant five years ago.

Trust and trusted sources of information in an age of disinformation are very important, as is community infrastructure, so that people know where they can get help informally and quickly. Are we investing in those community organisations and relationships? We have not been for 15 years or so.

There are also very basic things such as homelessness. Having safe, secure and adequate housing is important to keep people safe in any emergency, particularly during a pandemic. Can you comment on the extent to which a connection—beyond the direct medical and public health response to a pandemic—is being made to the social and economic conditions that will enable us to weather a storm?

From the public health perspective, public health is fundamentally shaped by social context.

I appreciate those answers—it is inevitable that there will be a health focus this morning, given the witnesses—but I am asking about the context. Is that work being done in the context of implementing the recommendation that the UK Government and devolved Governments should work together to introduce a whole-system civil emergency strategy?

This is the—

I agree that that point is important. However, it is all the more important because we have an unregulated landscape. You have twice talked about making sure that people can find or can access impartial or accurate content. I suggest that that will be entirely ineffective if people can find accurate, impartial information if they go looking for it but meanwhile are being actively bombarded with the very opposite.

Can you confirm that the work that you are doing on video on demand will not require YouTube, for example, as a content provider to pay due regard to impartiality and accuracy in the content that it provides to everybody? I do not think that you are empowered to that.

That remains a massive gap in regulation of the news that people consume.

I cannot shake the feeling that we still have an approach to regulation and scrutiny of, and political debate about, the BBC that derives from a time when it was massively dominant in terms of the economics of production, storytelling, culture and news. It was massively dominant, but now it is a player in a market. It seems to me that the legislation that you mentioned—the Online Safety Act 2023 and the Media Act 2024—might catch us up to where we should have been 20 years ago, but it does not fully address the current landscape and what it will continue to evolve into.

The media act does give you some powers in relation to video on demand. I looked at your website to see whether the consultation on that is out yet, but I did not see it. I want to ask about the context, scope and breadth of that consultation, but I will connect my question to the point that the convener made about the recent Liverpool incident. The BBC quite properly immediately said that the incident was not being reported as a terrorist incident and that the suspect is white, but that did not matter at all because huge numbers of people were immediately fed lies that the suspect was an immigrant or that it was a terrorist attack. There is nothing at all that the regulated parts of news can do to stop the very deliberate proliferation of lies and conspiracy theories. The Liverpool incident is by no means the only example of major video-on-demand platforms actively promoting conspiracy theories, far-right propaganda and the kind of public health misinformation that we saw during Covid.

What is Ofcom empowered to do under the Media Act 2024 about those very profound challenges of disinformation, conspiracy theories and lack of political neutrality during an election on major video-on-demand platforms, as well as the proliferation of social media platforms?