Annemarie is Director of Innovation for the Seetec Group. Before that, she was, Director of Policy and Strategy at Future Care Capital - a national charity that uses the insight gathered through evidence-based research to advance ideas that will help shape future health and social care policy to deliver better outcomes for society.
We chat about what is under appreciated about libraries and how to think about public goods and common ownership of those goods.
Annemarie discusses the idea of a Sovereign Health Fund and how to think about healthcare data as a public good, what trust is needed and how health value can be created by pooling data.
We discuss the benefits and cons of social media, how tricky regulation is (partly because it always behind the times) and how there might be more benefits that commonly thought of.
Annemarie talks about her work and Seetec’s on the future of justice and how leveraging data and digital technology can help shape a better justice system and also prevent re-offending. She offers insights in to how new technology is creating new forms of crime and whether more careful thinking can prevent these types of crime from occuring. How will crime in the metaverse work out?
We chat about how different ownership models and for-profit or not-profit can shape the purpose and outlook for employees. The importance of optimism and the sense of looking after something for the next generation.
Annemarie notes Henry VIII gave powers to the secretary of state but didn’t consider accountability provisions. She raises the challenge of accounting standards for intangible assets and proposes an idea of giving NFTs (digital assets) to children at birth (cf. Bored Ape Yacht Club).
Annemarie is more of a nonfiction reader but she commissioned a work of science fiction and we speak about imagining different types of future and how to inspire people.
We play overrated/underrated on:
Big Tech regulation
GPDR (data regulation)
GDP
Carbon tax
Digital Health
Innovation agencies
Calories on menus
Annemarie ends our conversation on giving out her life advice.
Listen below or wherever you get podcasts. Video above or on YouTube.
PODCAST INFO
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo
Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh
AnneMarie Naylor (transcript, only lightly edited, expect typos etc.)
Ben Yeoh (00:06): Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be speaking to AnneMarie Naylor. AnneMarie has done fantastic work and thinking around community assets, social and healthcare innovation, and has worked with central government and nonprofits and now is the head of innovation at Seetec, which is a majority employee-owned business. Welcome.
Ben Yeoh (00:31): So first question from some of your earlier work, what is most appreciated or underappreciated about libraries? I guess this expands to many ideas of common public goods, but maybe let's start with what is your thinking on libraries and how we should think about public goods in general?
AnneMarie (00:52): Okay. So on a personal note, I grew up in a small mining village during the 80's where there wasn't a great deal of social infrastructure, we'll say save a very small library and graduated through that into the school library as a librarian. So, I have a kind of long standing personal love of those spaces, but in a professional capacity, about 15 years ago was managing a kind of service at the time within a charitable context to help communities that wanted to save London buildings or take them over and manage them in their own way of different locals across the country. And as a result of posterity, we suddenly got a rapid upsurge in telephone calls from communities afraid that their library would be closed. That's part of that. So I kind of have both a passion personally, but then having to learn how libraries work and how libraries work in a community context, kind of got me involved in that agenda in much more in depth terms.
AnneMarie (01:49): And I guess my original passion is cause I think their social mobility passports, the ultimate silver bullet, particularly in poor communities and I think increasingly we have an opportunity to use libraries in particular to embed stem or steam skills as the kind of nature of the labor market and the economy changes so that people from all kinds of background could benefit from the opportunities that that economy gives us. Without which I don't get as much opportunity at school. So I'm kind of passionate about them as an opportunity space for everybody, I suppose.
Ben Yeoh (02:27): How do you put them in public ownership? I guess most of the time they're owned by local councils or local authorities in the UK to some degree. I think actually I was reading it's slightly different in Denmark and in the US, but there is this idea that it should be a common public good of some sort. And is that the best way of thinking or of ownership of that or what happens when a local authority wants to close down a library? Is there some way of taking a community asset and we've actually had similar things, I guess, in the UK with community green spaces, even community pubs, and this idea in your work of how you can essentially get a community asset if maybe the state is not interested or actually the community feels there's a need and can bring something together.
AnneMarie (03:17): So working for the charity locality my task there was to set up the first asset transfer unit. So over the course of about five years we transferred about 5,000 different types of landed buildings right up and down the length and breadth of the country, much more difficult clearly in areas like London, where you have high land values, and there's much more private interest in developing those spaces. But not to the exclusion of terrific projects in London. So the Oxo Tower is part of one of the largest development trusts in the country. So that's community owned. And I think in terms of libraries, as you say, there's sort of 151 top tier authorities that a random majority of libraries have and always have since the public libraries act was brought about in the sort of 60's. And then there came austerity and I think by the time five years have passed, austerity wit supported the transfer of about 15% of public libraries into community hands. So largely run on a volunteer basis, not necessarily ideal, but some whole library services taken out in mutual funds run by the employees and communities together in partnership. So there's a range of governance models, I guess, and ownership models in relation to libraries, I would think quite unusual in the European context.
Ben Yeoh (04:36): And do you think that is a better model or I guess what are the advantages of that, or is it simply that it's a way of gaining a community asset when actually the powers that besets the local authority don't want it anymore? So it's just a way of saving that or are there actually other advantages to thinking about more mutual forms of governance or these other ideas of community assets?
AnneMarie (05:02): I mean, I think there are pros and cons to all the different government mechanisms you might use in deploying relation to different service types but I think it's the wrong thing to have to react to the threat of closure. The idea would be for communities to proactively have a vision and a desire to develop something proactively with a clear end in sight. So one of the biggest challenges, I guess, we face at the time was that a lot of more affluent communities would naturally feel like they remember the library being important to them and library is about books and we are going to run it cause we've got more spare time than perhaps a more deprived settings where there's less of a reading culture. So the real shame for me when it came to the threat of closure during those years. It was basically that you were going to get a less proactive defense of library provision by more deprived communities quite often, unless you had the ability to actually maintain and manage them on a voluntary basis.
AnneMarie (05:54): So for me the missed opportunity was perhaps the opportunity to see many more social enterprises in that space trying to reinvent the kind of business model underpinning libraries, really something that I had some experience of trying to do and given that the library gives you something free at the point of view and it's full of books that are free and the library requires them to remain free. It's not an easy challenge to tell them interest, social enterprise for buildings are not conducive to using additional space but one that I think was very, very well done by some communities.
Ben Yeoh (06:24): Sure. That makes a lot of sense and that's the intersectional part with what you mentioned earlier about the opportunity on social mobility and the intersectionality with social economics. I was interested, I was speaking with economist, Diane Coil, the other day and she mentioned that she was more of a fan of what she would call universal basic infrastructure, which I feel libraries is a part of. Actually over and above a universal, basic income, because actually infrastructure is something which could grow for everyone and I was just wondering whether you thought anything particularly about other basic infrastructure ideas or this idea of public goods and whether you might have a view about the importance of it in terms of an overall policy strategy.
AnneMarie (07:11): Sure. So I think certainly working with tangible London buildings and community assets in a physical sense for five years, my own kind of thinking evolve from there and trying to begin to think what did the digital economy that was really burgeoning at the time for the private sector, what did that mean for communities and how could they get engaged in that? What might it look like to have, for example, community ownership of intangible assets, which I know Diane has written extensively on, it's something I'm an expert in. So from there we kind of looked at whether or not it was possible to support the kind of installation of community and Wi-Fi infrastructure, for example, where we have people who, because of a lack of a credit rating, couldn't get their own access to the internet. I feel like that's a bit 2019 now, seeing it as though that kind of idea of free broadband didn't do too well in a particular manifesto, at least not from a kind of public support perspective.
AnneMarie (08:03): But I can see massive benefits having worked in communities where there was no library and people couldn't search for jobs, their children couldn't do homework simply because they were affected by data poverty, so a massive challenge. Whether or not I think the state could provide really good telecom services, I'm not sure. Whether, you know, how that would be managed in terms of a national kind of provision of such infrastructure. So how do we do the different would be the question. And I think the universal basic income is not something that I'm as okay with to be brutally honest but I see that there's been a pilot recently just set up in Ireland. I think it's 320 euros a week for creative individuals and artists and I think that's for the next three years. They're testing that with about 2000 people to see what outcome and impact that has and there are several around the world in Canada and other places that are quite notable. I think personally, I'd be more interested now in thinking about it's kind of an obsession with the income and earning your living in a traditional sense and the taxation and the right level seems to be the nerdy kind of reading of that agenda and I guess from my perspective, I'm quite interested now with the moving to NFTs and into digital assets of different types and classes. How do we look at endowing digital assets or giving children an endowment of digital assets, as opposed to just thinking purely in narrow terms around infrastructure and income as a kind of interesting starting life?
Ben Yeoh (09:29): Sure. Yeah. It's interesting that there is this pushback or was this pushback in the UK on some of this say digital infrastructure or intangible or where tangible meets tangible, because for instance, in Taiwan, they have a lot of digital infrastructure, which is public good. And I believe in South Korea, the equivalent of their social housing skipped fixed line, what I've heard, to a stuck phone and they went straight to mobile and fast broadband. So they went and actually that's the equivalent of all of their social housing.
AnneMarie (10:04): There's certainly a lot of community and Wi-Fi networks across the European union. So I met some wonderful people that were working on [community wifi] out in Italy and also Greece to hook different islands up using their own community. Took a trip up to Scotland where they have a terrific broadband connection, super-fast. Built into its kind of university network - underground and under the sea. But there's also an over the sea kind of Wi-Fi line of side connection that's been forged by a professor at the university of Edinburgh as well, based on his work at the university. He happens to live in the most remote part of the United Kingdom in [Inaudible:00:10:39]. So he was there sending his students up the Hills to try to work out the right line of sight if the waves got very high in bad weather.
AnneMarie (10:44): So really interesting and innovative attempts to kind of build these line of sight Wi-Fi communities. If you go to Barcelona next week, you're going to easily plug into Griffinnet which is a community under a managed roof network. So fantastic initiatives and here it seems much harder, I think because of the big monopolies in the kind of telecom space around infrastructure but nevertheless, we've given it a go [ ] and also working up in North Yorkshire working with farmers who were digging up their own land without the way it was needed and then laying their own fiber and trying to work out how they could build a network for just 250 people, because they weren't really cost effective for the big monopoly to play with. So really interesting community-led initiatives to try and solve challenges for farmers who need to be online.
Ben Yeoh (11:32): And I think that makes the point that actually it is doable or should in theory be doable, at least in this country, there do seem to be some of these barriers and I think that's interesting and maybe that's the way some of that will go. And thinking about other public goods, I know you've done a lot of work on healthcare data and also essentially ideas of trust and community and I'm of opinion and the balls have been reports on this that you could do enormous good on population level, healthcare data, algorithms, thinking about managing populations and insights that you could do there. But it also seems to me that in general, there is a lack of public trust on this. You can see that when the government or various authorities tried to make some of the healthcare data a little bit more opt in, opt out available, there was a kind of pushback on some of that. And I was reading an idea, which I think originated with some of your thinking about a sovereign health fund as a sort of new institution managing some of this institution this intangible data, which could get around that. So I'm really interested to have your views on maybe the opportunities and obstacles for this and whether we should be spending a little bit of time and resource on something like a sovereign health fund, which could be an enormously impactful idea, I feel.
AnneMarie (12:55): So the sovereign health fund idea came around in my last post working at Future Care Capital where we were looking in particular as the new GDPR came into force in terms of the UK data protection act in 2018 and thinking about the trust issue, but more trustworthiness in the sense of [ ] kind of workout that trust flat out, not so attractable as an idea, I don't think in that space. And the idea was how could you create a high trust mechanism? So how do you persuade the public that this is a public good in a sense, because they used to be NHS being a public good in a certain regard, but by turn they see their data, their health data as their personal data rather than that of the NHS, quite rightly. So how do you kind of marry those ideas up?
AnneMarie (13:41): So the idea was basically you'd give people an opportunity to opt in, opt out but to see transparently what data has been used to develop. So what new innovations in the science and medical space, the digital space and people could transparently look at that, but they could also see there'd be a kickback for the NHS and that the funds would be ring-fenced. Now, since then, we know there's been a sort of semi [tax for] health and care kind of adjunct to the national insurance contribution. And it's not entirely complicated given the recent sort of spring statement from the chancellor and it shows the challenges of it. And I think the biggest, biggest opponent I encountered working for five years on the idea was really the treasury first and foremost, but also finance bonds in the NHS who to all intents and purpose don't necessarily regard the status as entrepreneurial [ ] and who think that probably paying down the deficit is the culture in the treasury is the first priority not to make money. And my own view is that it would be absolutely shambolic if we had the most amazing resource which we do in NHS health data and we ended up some companies using that to develop a cure or some kind of treatment for dementia, and Alzheimer's particularly with our aging society, and then we couldn't afford it.
AnneMarie (14:55): So if we as collective individuals, we agree to pool our data to get this common goal that will benefit the whole world if it works in the way that we did join the pandemic, when the data was kind of used under different emergency circumstances to find dexamethasone, some of the key treatments I just don't see why we wouldn't want to actually pull that together for so long as we can be assured that we will get the benefit of that collectively back and even as a partial kind of contribution to the kind of echo of private actors. So it seems to be a no-brainer, but it's not necessarily in keeping with the sort of treasuries tilt towards not really regarding the state as entrepreneurial best place to try and be entrepreneur.
Ben Yeoh (15:34): That's really interesting. I guess you, well, you work for some time within central government, but I guess I have to call up someone in the treasury and have an argument with them over this, because it seems to me-- I completely agree and I was reading and speaking to Stein Westlake and Jonathan Haskel who talk about this in terms of the intangible economy and it seems to me, this is an enormous intangible asset potentially one of the biggest in the world, because as you alluded to the NHS has this unique NHS number. So as a developed world, a country, we have a unique data set, which even the US would not be able to compare in terms of what we could do and I estimate the value of that in the tens of billions, potentially, even in the hundreds of billions, I think you could have an estimate for that. And I think it would be relatively easy to get one of two or three of the big healthcare or healthcare tech companies to pay for access for that data and use that to develop, let's say, a new Alzheimer's treatment or population health.
Ben Yeoh (16:35): So they would give the UK money for that and or any treatments that would come out of it would be at cost or very cheap for us as the UK. And there would be a global spillover because you wouldn't be able to invent this without this database, right. So the US would actually piggyback on what we would do and sure the US would have to have to pay up for that, for the company to make a profit or something else. But because the UK database is unique, there was no other asset for it to do that. So I think it makes total sense.
Ben Yeoh (17:12): But you charge them, you charge those companies and they would pay for it and you could do some sort of risk sharing. I'm sure there is a way that both sides could benefit with that.
AnneMarie (17:21): Quite a lot of work has been undertaken over the last three or four years to look at the various different ways that you could charge. So you could charge for access. You could talk about an equity stake in companies. You could charge and link your data access to a particular piece of IP, rather than sharing a company, you have a particular outcome in relation to that intellectual property that it facilitates. So there's a whole range of things you could do and there's a dedicated unit as a result, largely of the conversations that I was very privileged to be a part of really over the last five years now and set up dedicated fashion in the department of health to look at how we do that in a kind of trusted and trusting sense.
Ben Yeoh (18:05): Sure. Well, I hope they come to some sort of agreement cause at least there's a couple of-- I speak to CEOs of a couple of these types of company and one is a sort of two, $300 billion market cap healthcare technology company and I am sure they would do something like that, pay a very large royalty and there'd be no cost really. There would only be benefit to the UK, but in any event I was thinking on the trust issue, social media companies actually in search and technology companies essentially use our data like this and I guess a typical person doesn't think too hard about the data that they are giving away. And therefore when you get a free map service or a free email service, it's kind of not free because you're sort of paying it with the aggregated data and typically the average person or particularly if that person is young, kind of doesn't care so much seemingly that they've given away all of this data because they get a service in exchange. So it seems to me almost remarkable that we don't have that level of trust with our own kind of NHS health data as we do with some of the social media companies. Do you think that is a kind of a reasonable kind of template comparison and so that if you could be as convincing as some of the social media companies or offer services which people deem as valuable, there is no theoretical reason why the public wouldn't also accept that.
AnneMarie (19:31): I think it's the old adage. If it's free, you are the product in some respects and we know for example, Facebook could tell that you are liable to be pregnant before you can quite often from just the share volume of data. I was listening to a wonderful webinar last week and somebody was saying that, I think the big energy companies have an idea about 6 different types of customer that they have based on the amount of data they've got. Whereas something like Amazon has more than 150,000 customer personas because every interaction is a click and it can be managed at that level and they just have that volume and breadth of product and service offer that they can learn so much about us. Obviously you get quite a different picture from the NHS health data because it's not actually health data, it's sick data. Health data is when you're not needing to be in the health service.
AnneMarie (20:18): So do we capture that? Who captures that, is a kind of interesting side of those questions I think. Is some of that on social media? So it gets a lot of stick and I think there's reason for social media companies and platforms to have great concerns, particularly in light of the kind of recent invasion of Ukraine and then shutting down of different internet services and platforms and what that means for free speech and for democracy generally and so I think there's some reasons to be concerned about the kind of enclosure of the internet and the shutting down of different platforms that become such key pieces of monopolistic type infrastructure in our lives during the pandemic. I don't think many of us who are at least privileged enough to have a connection to the internet would've survived in quite such good spirits as we did were it not for the ability to connect with people through various platforms, including this one. So, I think there's a kind of quid pro quo. There's a lot of bad press, but I think there's also a lot of benefits and it's about weighing up those two things, I think.
Ben Yeoh (21:17): Yeah. It's not as obvious when you really think about it whether there are net negatives. In fact, like you say, there are actually a lot of net positive benefits when you look at it and you see this with some. So you have it with the sort of travel app type companies as well and there's a lot of pushback into and fro, but when you look at the data, it gives access often to a lot of vulnerable people a lot of people who wouldn't normally because, you know, taxi drivers typically might not go to certain poor areas or areas they don't pick up or they don't wish to go there. Whereas actually on the apps, they kind of have much less choice, at least from the driver's side. If that's it, they choose it. And so you pick it up. So when they looked at it, they found that the more vulnerable people actually saw more benefit from that type of thing. So again, obviously there's the employer, employee piece on the driver side but if you're looking at just that customer welfare, it is not as simple a picture as you thought. You said, oh, is it just a simple taxi replacement service? Well actually there are certain other benefits to it, which aren't obvious. I was thinking, what are the kind of projects you are working on now? I think Seetec are working on ideas on the future of justice, which might be quite an interesting thing. So a future of justice, or what are the other kind of projects or interests you have at the moment?
AnneMarie (22:40): So for the last 12 months, I've sort of been poacher turned gamekeeper. I'm not sure if that's back to front actually. So, I spent most of the last five year is, or 10 years lobbying around issues to do with data technology, community ownership, and access to those things and how we best leverage them for public good from data and technology and I now find myself with the privilege really of managing a terrific team of people for the Seetec group who are in and of themselves on that journey of trying to develop a terrific sort of data driven hub and service provision for the whole group. And the group works across trying to help people to acquire skills to help them find employment but equally people who touch the criminal justice system in one form or another.
AnneMarie (23:24): And so we're an inherently people driven business and we're all about people. So it's for me a massive challenge to see how we can make the most of data and technology without losing that human touch. So, that's the kind of area where I'm kind of having worked for five years in the sort of health and social care data space. Move now into a different part of the kind of government's agenda, I guess, but from the opposite side, looking in. So on the future of justice, I guess we are looking at the future of justice and we're looking at the future of welfare and also the future of skills provision and how we use new technologies like VR and other platforms to kind of enhance learning opportunities. From the point of view of justice in particular, we're quite interested in. Traditionally you think about prevention or I am interested in it. But I am interested in the way in which data and technology can be used and leveraged to facilitate prevention in the justice space.
AnneMarie (24:21): I think there's the overwhelming majority of investment on the part of the government in particular and down to police and crime commissioners tends to be in a digital budget, which is about policing or catching criminals as it were rather than rehabilitation or prevention. So I'm kind of interested in how we leverage data and technology for good in those two spaces. And I'm also interested in the extent to which we can work with technology developers and providers and prevent new criminal sanctions and offenses even coming into being because we have more full thought when we start to look at developing new technologies. So we wouldn't, for example, have had sexting as a criminal offense without the iPhone. Could we have avoided it if we'd thought more carefully about how we developed the phone in the first place and its capabilities in certain contexts or in certain angles? I don't know but other things we can see now, our crime rates are going to be affected for example, by the growth in the use of, for example, ring doorbells, video doorbells of different types. If it's only affluent and middle class communities that put those doorbells in place because they can, does that mean that we're going this way where policing is focused away from poor neighborhoods and deprived communities that can't afford those technologies. So what do all these different technologies mean for the kind of criminal justice landscape is kind of where I'm interested in at the moment?
Ben Yeoh (25:45): Well, that's fascinating or even the other way, like if we neighborhoods have all of these tech enabled cameras, then you want maybe more police on the ground in the neighborhoods, which don't have it. And I think that's really interesting about the use of data or also the real analysis of it because I was reading a report. And so, this was on the ideas of preventing re-offense, which is a really big cost in somewhere where you can kind of-- particularly youth re-offence where if you can-- There's evidence, if you can get in there early and change the outcome, you can get many more positive outcomes. Whereas if you go back into the system two or three times, it's very, very hard to get out. That's the kind of prison system and the sort of piece of data that they saw was if you eat with your family or the family equivalent two or three times a day, those type of people were less likely to reoffend, but it isn't actually the meal. The meal is a symbol of everything else that you've got a coherent family unit and obviously enough trust and money to have meals together and all of that type of thing and definitely I felt that the analysis of, okay, if we can identify what's going on through this potentially via data, then you can actually have much more effective interventions. And then there's just the other side of, I noticed this in the last couple of years of things like tribunals, there was no reason for a lot of tribunals not to go digital, which actually, if you can have digital access for people might make it simpler for those type of people to access better justice. So there's a kind of thing on the technology side as well, which I thought was interesting.
AnneMarie (27:27): The thing is there's something interesting also potentially about the kind of big move. If we look during the pandemic, obviously there's lots of text or SMS based scams in operations, sadly. But we've also seen a growth in sort of white collar fraud and computer related crimes going through the roof at a time when theft obviously went down due to people being at home largely. So it just seems to me it's a really interesting period of time where data and technology are potentially going to shift, potentially shift the class of people that we would normally associate most with the criminal justice system; that could be shifting as a result of the crimes that data and technology make possible in the virtual world. So it seems to me crime in the metaverse will be an interesting development, although clearly not helpful but just another kind of strand showing you that these new technologies just give rise to completely new challenges and can we actually design them out better to affect more cost effective prevention than we seem to be able to at the moment. It seems to me as a really important area of activity and I don't see lots of people talking in that space.
Ben Yeoh (28:34): Yeah, exactly. So the crime of stealing an NFT, so stealing some digital bits, seems still to be possible, but interesting you can potentially trace it a lot easier and there's been these interesting cases of hacking and the hackers actually sending it back and then them claiming that they were doing it to test the system or not, which you don't know, but the fact that you could trace it was different. As opposed to someone being robbed at the cash machine, you're now having a lot more telephone banking swindle fraud type things. Like you say, it's really shifting. Referring back to our earlier thoughts on sort of community ownership and the sense of being different, do you think a Seetec being majority employee-owned makes a difference to how it's thought?
Ben Yeoh (29:23): There's a lot of thinking about stakeholder holders versus shareholders versus how you think, but there is an idea which actually goes back quite a long way that where people feel ownership and that can come from different forms where people feel ownership over the long term, you tend to get more alignment, maybe more purpose and more kind of pulling in together. Whereas if you feel that there's a gap, call it an agency issue or a kind of worker management type issue and you're doing it for something which is less purposeful because it's a much more transactional nature, then those organizations don't tend to have such strong call it social human relationship capital, and therefore tend in an intangible sense to maybe be a little bit less wealthy in terms of what they can achieve. I guess you've now worked on two or three different sides of that. So from a personal experience, do you kind of view that maybe as to have some truth or what the pros and cons of it are, and maybe even on a kind of policy level cause it's interesting that I don't feel in the UK, we do have that many forms of say mutuality or partnerships, even though those structures exist, they're no longer seemingly dominant forms and even though there's been regulation for social enterprises and things of the like, they don't seem to have maybe caught the light as much as these other dominant forms, except perhaps in some of these community asset things that we were talking about earlier.
AnneMarie (30:53): So I guess we'll candid hand on heart is this is the first time I've taken a job with a for-profit and I think I very much was attracted to Seetec because it's employee own because I've always worked in the kind of public sector space or in the mission led space. I think that for me on a personal level was kind of an essential part of me moving into something completely different and I wouldn't go too far from the mission vision value type area that I'm always been used to. I think Seetec in particular has a really nice ethos around wishing to serve service users rather than provide services to people which is terrific. And there's a real sense of stewardship and how we have a responsibilities employee owners, I think to kind of stewardly alright, the corporate body, but the intellectual property and the approach that we've nurtured over 35 years almost so that can continue into the future and be there a benefit to future service users, but also clearly other employee owners.
AnneMarie (31:55): So it's kind of a temporary ownership or a transitory ownership, which I think is a really interesting concept and appeal of the kind of employee/ownership model and certainly from our perspective, it's very much about engaging people in governance processes directly throughout the business, so that they have both a say in a stake. So that kind of deficit, as you say, in other types of organizations where there's a gap and you're just out on the payroll and one of a number I think that's completely different in an employee own organization and that really shines too, I think in everywhere you meet people across the business.
Ben Yeoh (32:31): Yeah. That sense that you are looking after something for either the next generation or for something further. I do think that that does change that sort of outlet and the thinking. Perhaps with a slight pivot then on policy and blue sky thinking with all of this work that you've done, innovation, healthcare, social, now on justice if there are one or two policy things that you could enact or you think would be a real idea what would that be and maybe you can bucket it into ones which you actually think are politically tractable. So there's no reason why we couldn't do it today except for money and the law and things. And one maybe, which is blue sky, where actually there might be a difficulty on a political pushback, but you still think it would be a really good idea to put in place.
AnneMarie (33:25): I think optimism is essential. So, you kind of gave me the heads up on this question and I was thinking about it cause I probably have a long list of things that I'd like to see wish list wise. But in terms of the things that are more challenging, I guess, I'm increasingly intrigued. How do we overcome political short-termism so that we can invest in and reap the benefits? So I think the cost benefits, most of the social benefits and the human kind of implications of prevention, everybody talks about it. Nobody does it because of five year political cycles and less, and now there's no fixed term parliament and that's probably even more short and more subjective kind of political intervention. So how do we do that? And so I'd like to see, I guess I thought about this idealistically.
AnneMarie (34:07): So if you see on the front of most pieces of legislation in this country, you'll find Henry VIII powers for the secretary of state. What I don't see is Henry VII and accountability provisions that say you must use these powers wisely. We give them to you, but we will hold you accountable for the medium and long term, not just today, while you are the minister with privilege. So I'm kind of interested in the work in Wales and using other countries where they've got specific legislation about future generations and making people kind of mindful and accountable for decisions they take today for the next generation, particularly around climate, for example, lots other areas. I think we often don't think about inaction. We gave you powers, you didn't do something or you chose not to act and actually that has material consequences for different communities and cohorts across society. So how do we do that would be my wish list one. I'm not sure we'd persuade any ministers to make themselves accountable for life for their decisions they've taken in office but that would be one of the pros to prevention.
AnneMarie (35:02): I think. In terms of borrowing small things at a geeky, perhaps because of the last few years, it amazes me that there are no international accounting standards that have been agreed with which you can then account for or value intangible assets, particularly data. So you can for intellectual property, but not for data. So, as you said earlier, you thought that the NHS data set might be worth billions nobody knows, and nobody can agree anyway, irrespective of what the quality of that data looks like, how much cleaning up is required, et cetera, and who should pay. The valued question is really perplexing, because there are no international accounting standards. So I would quite like to see the value of our data as citizens of the United Kingdom on the United Kingdom balance sheet on the whole of government accounts. I can't believe in this day and age that we are still accounting for landed buildings, but not for intangible assets. That's such a kind of central feature of our kind of modern economy but I'm kind of concerned at the same time that those discussions happen amongst businesses and key actors in terms of states [ ] , but they don't include NGOs and civil society. And that voice is missing in kind of working out what that valuation and value proposition should look like. So they're my two policies.
Ben Yeoh (36:15): That's really fascinating.
AnneMarie (36:16): I don't want very much.
Ben Yeoh (36:18): I'm very happy for you if you'd like to raise number two or number three on your list for things which are intractable, if you want to thought, feel free to do that. I'm going to respond to your data thing because it might be geeky. I think it's quite important. I believe though, if you-- Maybe we should do this, if we got in touch with the ONS the stats authority, I think they could or should do some work on that. That's a definite project for them on that but I also do happen to be linked in to the international accounting standards boards and I do know they will take civil society and other stakeholder views, but I do know they really struggle to find the appropriate people. So I am very happy to connect you with them. They have done quite a lot of work on intangible thinking in general, but I do not believe that this data point has come up and I don't know if you're aware, this is more adjacent but they are forming international standards boards on sustainability, as well as this thinking of intangibles, but that's currently happening now. So they're doing a lot of consultation and stakeholdering, so I'm very happy to put you in touch with this --
AnneMarie (37:39): Always very keen. I think--
Ben Yeoh (37:41): --With this piece on data. So, I happen to be involve very much on something called management commentary, which is quite boring, but actually not. So it's geeky rather than boring, which is the front half of the annual report, because I believe as most of us do that it hasn't moved on much along with the times enough, mainly due to intangibles and the like. So I definitely think that's really interesting and important and I really like this idea of accountability for the long term or at least longer term than we have it. Did you want to put ideas two or three or shall we move on?
AnneMarie (38:21): I've got a long list, but they may dream of tickets, I think at the moment. I suppose the other one that I was thinking of was probably more a policy initiative and legislation. I'm not sure if that counts.
Ben Yeoh (38:31): Oh yeah, let's go.
AnneMarie (38:33): I'll take Liberty. So if we look back there were pros and cons to Gordon Brown policy initiatives about endowing or giving young children savings accounts which was to give people kind of an equal opportunity by the time they hit 16 or 18 years of age to have certain access to resources that they might not otherwise have had. And I'm kind of interested now in how we kind of modernize that idea and think about whether or not we can't raise more taxes. It seems that we've already got tax raising and deficit problems and the cost of living of course, squeeze it right across the board and all the press at the moment. But if we don't print money, could we print NFTs or print digital assets? And can we give those to children from deprived backgrounds to give them a starting life and give them [Inaudible:00:39:16] as a kind of a government starting position?
AnneMarie (39:19): How might that work, and given that some of the kind of-- I'm thinking of things like the bored [ape yacht] club and other things like that with the NFTs where you've kind of got this kind of community of startup investors who have a piece of that basically by purchasing their NFT. So it's a different startup capitalization kind of process from my perspective. How do we do that for young people and create that club mentality, which is obviously a benefit to so many who go to private school, for example, and benefit from the club? How do we give this kind of club or community space and digital assets to more deprived communities and their children and the next generation? So, I don't know if that's legislation, but it's certainly a policy area around the kind of future of welfare that I've been really key to work on with people.
Ben Yeoh (40:01): That is really fascinating, cause there is this relatively young movement coming out of crypto and the like and I do see it potentially falling into that, although everything's kind of all early days on that. It seems to me that is slightly adjacent to what is maybe the movement. I don't know if you come across them of EA or effective altruists. They tend to be quite interested in long-termism, although that's even longer than 50 years and it is quite interesting because two or three or quite a lot of them-- Essentially they're these crypto billionaires have been EA minded and therefore they've recently started giving hundreds of millions to very different philanthropic ideas of which this would definitely be one. So they're very interested in funding what you would not have thought about in traditional charity spaces. So thinking about biosecurity or digital infrastructure or that. So yeah, I think that'd be a really interesting idea.
Ben Yeoh (41:11): Okay. Slight pivot again. I guess this is slightly arts and culture, but what do you think science fiction can teach us or stories maybe in general? It seems to me that science fiction on average seems to be more dystopian than hopeful, but you have got a strand of, I guess, at the extreme of something like techno optimism as well and like you say, sort of digital things, you can use them for bad or for good, right? You can do fraud or you can maybe enable, you could do data analysis and things and a lot of your ideas seem to be focusing on what I would call like the Jedi light side of these things. You know, how do you give digital assets to youth? How do you make sure that people are enabled? Is there anything about stories in arts and culture on science fiction which you think we could learn from or is attractive in this area?
AnneMarie (42:04): So the first thing to fess up is that I'm a terrible board that loves nonfiction rather than fiction but I do confess to having commissioned one series of work on fiction, which was in the science fiction space. That was in my last role at Future Care Capital; a fantastic array of essays available via their website for Shameless Plug, but essentially with beautiful illustrations. And really the idea there was, how do you get people to imagine beyond today? So you tell stories. So, we can get people to understand one another when they've got differences and they come from different backgrounds and experiences through storytelling. It seems to me it really is, and perhaps that goes back to my love of libraries, but the idea of bringing things to life through storytelling. And I think that was what we sought to do was to kind of look at how do you show people that the new and emergent technologies of our time could both positively and negatively impact health and care in the way that they evolve over the coming years?
AnneMarie (42:59): So everything from care robots which some people think is terrific because they're finally going to give somebody a companion and other people is just horrified and think that the idea there is, you know, we should have human beings for all of these roles and caretakers, which is perhaps unrealistic with the growing number of people amongst us, including us in the next 20, 30 years join the aging society. So it is just fascinating to me, science fiction, I think allows you to suspend disbelief and my other favorite thing for some years now is a company called Superflux and they do it more in three dimensions. So I guess it was my attempt to imitate them really. They have exhibitions using technology and data and different kinds of videos to prompt people to think what if it was like this. So I'm kind of really interested in how you get people to stop thinking there's no alternative to the current welfare state and provision, or there's no alternative to libraries providing books and nothing else. How do you actually reinvent things? Because change is quite hard. So how do you inspire people to go with change and together and to kind of imagine it.
Ben Yeoh (44:04): That's really fascinating and I guess particularly on systems change, you are going to need the leap of imagination. So that's a really useful way into it. And some of it is happening now. I had a conversation recently with Sophie Willy who's an actor and performer, but she grew up hearing and then went almost completely deaf and is now hearing again. And into some extent she views herself as augmented or kind of like a cyborg and this will just continue. We already have these pieces to it and what does that mean? And she said something which has really stuck with me is that for instance there was a part where you have AI and you have captions and they come up automatically and people really criticize the captions when they get it wrong and she said, and you criticize the AI in a way you would never criticize a human, except that AI or captions are really my friend.
Ben Yeoh (45:03): There was a time that was the only way that I could get a sense of what was happening in a conversation and I wouldn't be critical in the same way. … but it was really fascinating, this idea that actually they've become so important that you are treating it in a different way that perhaps we would've thought about 20 or 30 years ago. So maybe a little section we can do quick fire on overrated, underrated. So you can go overrated, underrated on a kind of concept or idea, or you can pass or just make some sort of comment. So adjacent to some of our thinking. So overrated or underrated big tech, big technology regulation.
AnneMarie (45:51): Overrated.
Ben Yeoh (45:53): Overrated. And this is the idea that actually social media companies might have more good than you kind of think and regulation is perhaps over [Inaudible:00:46:01].
AnneMarie (46:02): [Inaudible:00:46:02] Wouldn't agree with that probably, but I think overrated in terms of its potential to be efficacious. So I would not say that traditional legislation and regulation does not do well with the digital world. It's not keeping up with the wild west and the pace to change an innovation. So, I think it's overrated in terms of the supposed safety and safeguarding it contains.
Ben Yeoh (46:28): It doesn't do what it wants to do, like good aim, but actually in practice, you can't keep up. Yeah. I think obviously that's generally true, generally the critique of a lot of regulation, but it seems to be particularly true of tech regulation, which moves so fast. Well, I guess there's a subset of that GPDR, which I guess was privacy and email regulation, overrated, underrated?
AnneMarie (46:51): So do you mean GDPR? Or do you mean GP-- There's another acronym. So the general data protection regulations, overrated? And again, I couldn't keep up. It was out of date before it hit the page. So I think we see that now with things like-- If you look at some of the trade deals the United Kingdom is striking up4712, for example, Japan, and you look at and delve into the details of what it says about algorithms in black boxes and how they're trade secrets and we don't want to see them, but that means we have no real control over the fact that could be coming in in the form of a medical device and be controlling the, I don't know, the air to lean direct in a hospital. So, we've kind of got this stuff that's not really thinking about the potency of algorithms, I think separating out the day to day protection issue and what that means for safety and protection. I think we need a broader definition. That's just not there in [Inaudible:00:47:43].
Ben Yeoh (47:44): Yeah, I also think that's true. If you just look at the practical effects, it's not done anything of what it wants to do and then have just actually created barriers for innovators or smaller companies or smaller ideas, which might be wanting to do something which is a solution. Again, not the intention. So the intention is very honorable, but interesting. Okay. A couple of metrics: GDP, gross domestic product as a metric, overrated, underrated.
AnneMarie (48:12): Overrated, because it doesn't really take into account the digital economy sufficiently, I don't think and particularly the things we talked about earlier in relation to the value of data and intellectual property that's data driven. I just don't think it's there at the moment.
Ben Yeoh (48:27): Yeah. Missing intangibles, also missing a lot of natural capital, which I think is the other part of it as well. Carbon tax or carbon taxes in general, overrated, underrated, do you think?
AnneMarie (48:42): I think it depends on what you call a carbon tax. Going forward I think worse is probably the kind of carbon credit idea that you can buy your way out of by trading your polluting behaviors with others. I just think it's, to some extent, morally bankrupt to not actually make the real effort to take care of the only thing we're all dependent upon collectively when particularly in the west, we have the wherewithal and the ability. So, it seems to me time is running out and talking about small tinkering around the edges is no longer the kind of way forward and that includes modest carbon taxes versus a wholesale systemic kind of change.
Ben Yeoh (49:18): True. So particularly, you don't like inauthentic carbon offsets. I can't think of one to hand, but obviously the majority of them are probably that as opposed to actually authentic nature based carbon sinks that are potentially there. But again, that's a big system change, you know, change your farmland into Peat Bogs or things like that. I guess we've talked a lot about this, but digital health data. I guess that's a big area overrated or underrated?
AnneMarie (49:50): Digital health. I think it's probably you know, it heralds such potential for the next 50 years, unless something else interrupts digital or the climate gives away. And I think in all seriousness, I think there's a kind of-- The worst thing about it is it overlooks care? So I think there's a lot of emphasis on the old medical model and using data and technology and innovation in that space to have sickness, but not in how we care for one another. And I think we've transformed kind of women's rights, different types of rights, civil rights over the last 50 years and you just think now we've got this completely different approach to the economy. I don't think we've kind of felt out how we care for one another in the world where women go to work and where childcare is the most expensive in Europe. If you look at the United Kingdom, we just haven't figured out how digital and data can help with those things in the way that we're kind of obsessed with creating kind of just like the modern incarnations of treatments. They're not leeches and they work better, but they're really like, it's just modern. It's the next step in health development of this evolution. It doesn't feel like we've given the right kind of attention to care.
Ben Yeoh (50:55): Yeah. That really chimes with some of the things I've been thinking about. So again, personal observation, not necessarily academic rigor, but the US spends a big percentage of GDP on healthcare. I think it's about 20%. We see the averages around to 10 to 12% of that level and their health outcomes are broadly average. You could even argue that they're below average in some, and above average in others but they're average. So they're definitely spending a lot of money and they're not as good as Germany, France, or even the UK, but a part of that deficit from what I can tell is because essentially they have in my view a limited social care spend, social infrastructure. So when you look at the Scandinavian countries and you're looking at just raw healthcare percentage spend, it doesn't take into account that actually essentially say community or how they look after the old is coming out of a different budget.
Ben Yeoh (51:53): And some of it is actually non budgetary, right? It's within the social and community capital, which has come through and actually, if you take that into account, that explains a bigger portion, you have these so-called death of despair in the US. A lot of that is opioid related and that is really not a kind of health budget issue sort of, but it's a sort of education, social poverty, other issue that allowed the opioid crisis to happen in the US, that it didn't happen so much in Europe. It was really not a health deficit, well, not purely a health budget deficit. So, I think that could be a really insightful observation and because to the way that departments are sort of siloed, right, the department of health doesn't quite look into enough of that, or the intersection of where education and health might be. Take something like vaccines, so vaccine hesitancy really comes from an education bucket more than a health bucket say or things like that.
AnneMarie (52:53): So, I think it's interesting that you have in fact a department of health and social care, but people think it's just a department of health. And I think that there is, for example, during the pandemic, we made massive use of data, health data and we were just streaks ahead. If you looked at the way that people were complaining about the lack of data in the United States at the same time to manage the pandemic, to understand different trends. What we didn't have was social care data. So we didn't have a clear understanding of the implications of the pandemic particular groups. For example, people with learning disabilities, we weren't able to count or say were they disproportionately affected so that we could protect them better. We didn't know who was living in which care home and who was working in them. We didn't collect that information in the way that we have this massive information in the NHS. And that is changing in the context of the health and care bill thanks for a lot of lobbying and advocacy, which I've been pleased be part of over the last few years and there is now a move towards the whole section of the bill is around social care data for the first time cause it's really radical to actually require private bodies to upgrade and invest in digital and their data maturity. I'd like them to go further clearly, but I think what they're doing is a really good first step and it will help immeasurably to understand this kind of interplay between health and social care systems across the country once we've got both data sets kind of quickly.
Ben Yeoh (54:05): That's an excellent idea. I didn't realize that was going through. We can put that on the tractable policies, which are actually happening, even though their--
AnneMarie (54:11): Things that work.
Ben Yeoh (54:14): And so, we should have done it sooner, should have done more, but at least it's good that it's happening. And this is true in some cases, general economic data. I was astounded that we still do not really know for instance how inflation effects on the poorest people in this country. So socioeconomic, however you want to do it, like bottom decile or bottom Quintel, so bottom 20%. And we actually, we just don't know the answer. So, the theory is that maybe they're impacted more from inflation on normal goods, cost of living, like cheap baked beans or basic pastas in the supermarket.
AnneMarie (54:53): If your choice is heat or eat, rather than have one less holiday or one less restaurant meal, it suggests that the cost of living crisis disproportionately impacts the poor.
Ben Yeoh (55:02): Yeah. So that's all that and we just didn't know the data. And then there was some cuts of the data that I saw that people tried to cobble together and said, mmmm, maybe there is a little bit more but it seems to be in the same order of magnitude. And it seemed to me that actually they missed out the whole lift experience element. So there was one element which was to me, which is that you can see this, which if you have access to online. So obviously most of the country does, but there's still 10, maybe 10 to 20% of the country, which didn't really have online access or at least always on online access. You could maybe go to a library and get some, and if you can get access to online prices, you're doing so much better than if you can only have access to your corner shop.
Ben Yeoh (55:50): So if in theory, you can get your basic pasta for 50 P, but you can only access that as an online price, which they are sampling and then you think, oh, well, that's gone up from 50 P to 55 P, that's not such a big deal, but actually if your corner shop is only ever stocking it at two pounds and you have no online access and you have no one who's going to deliver it to you and you have no Amazon prime that is not your lived experience of inflation, even if you're recording it better. So the stats that I saw and just a handful of pupil I spoke to was such a large disconnect that I thought this is uniquely where you should have a government data set, which is really looking onto this and then that would tie in because if it's really the case that inflation could be at least equal for poorer parts of society as well as richer parts of society, but only if you have access to the internet or other infrastructure, which allows you to access those prices then the government policy should definitely be well, let's give them that access.
Ben Yeoh (56:49): Okay. Yes, we can give them a cash handout while we are going through this crisis, but that's not the long term fix. The long term fix is to give them accessibility, yes, jobs and all of that and I thought that was a huge lacuna but anyway, last few on the overrated, underrated innovation agencies. So we have one in the UK coming up, I think it's going to be called [ARIA ] or something like that. But any of you on those?
AnneMarie (57:20): So ARIA, I think--
Ben Yeoh (57:21): ARIA, that's it? APA is the US one.
AnneMarie (57:25): Yeah. DARPA and APA, the acronym soup. What do I think about innovation agencies? I think it depends which ones you mean? So I think we've had an innovation agency or so, or a large national endowment in science and technology advancement over the last.
Ben Yeoh (57:38): Sure. And we've had Nesta.
AnneMarie (57:40): 15 years plus, I can't remember how long Nesta has been around and the terrific work it's done, but I think provoking kind of thinking and different thinking and cool offices, if nothing else. But I think the new kind of moonshot type agency is fine. I think if you look at innovation investment right now, I think two things strike me whether it's agencies that are causing governmental innovation agencies. I mean, innovation is not an ending itself. It's obviously the means to an end and it's important to think about what they're using that money for. I think there's a massive investment in science and technology and digital, and from my perspective, just a slight gripe with government policy probably but the personal wealth is that I feel it's really hard to actually get R and D investment or incentives from government to actually use data and technology to transform things that benefit people. So human relationships and the kinds of human services that we develop at Seetec. I'd really love to see different ways of government incentivizing to think about the future of justice, the future of welfare and how we use technology and skills and all that to do that and I don't think that that's kind of their first line of sight. They're thinking of just digital and science in quite a narrow sense at the moment, same with the R and D tax credits that the government's kind of got there. So I'd like to see that kind of evolve and develop a little bit more and I think the innovation agenda reflects that kind of bias slightly towards pure science and technology.
Ben Yeoh (59:04): So a little bit too narrow of focus and would be a more wider holistic idea of what wealth and value is over the long term.
AnneMarie (59:14): How we can do social innovation with data and technology and science and just actually in terms of [ ] big data.
Ben Yeoh (59:23): Great. And the last one is calorie counting on menus or perhaps this is the idea of nudging in general, but particularly on calories on menus, which is on the topic in the UK at the moment.
AnneMarie (59:37): It is, I don't know. It's probably overrated, I would say but I would not say that about listing full ingredients of everything that's been cooked in a place. So are we one of those people that really likes the detailed menus now? As a person with allergies, it makes my going out so much easier. So, I think that information to empower people and consumers can be incredibly valuable in that sense. Would it stop me eating a cake if I were allowed to eat it cause it didn't have anything dairy in it? Probably not, if it had the calories summed up, but that's my sweet tooth.
Ben Yeoh (01:00:09): I guess this is also the idea, is the regulation getting at the right type of thing? Cause also there's a, I guess there's a data issue with actually calorie counting or even that is quite an inexact science as well with cause there's so many other parts of it, whereas ingredients is kind of quite fair cause there's this sort of more consensus on it and calories not.
AnneMarie (01:00:34): It's quite useless though. It's quite useless when they add, but it could still contain all the other things that we said it didn't. So that kind of particular notice on chocolate is most outputting as far as I'm concerned.
Ben Yeoh (01:00:44): Yeah. It's like, does it actually have nuts or not? It might have nut's in it, that's actually not that helpful to know because it--
[Crosstalk: 01:00:53].
AnneMarie (01:00:54): Exactly.
Ben Yeoh (01:00:55): So there's that. Although I am adjacently relatively interested in essentially carbon labeling. So whereas I'm a little bit more skeptical on calories and also because there's people who have mental health challenges for which I think it would be unhelpful and also because generally you kind of know instinctively creamy chocolate cake dessert things are going to be more calorie rich than celery. I think it's a little bit more hidden on carbon intense products and services versus less carbon intense services. So the extent that we don't have a systemic carbon tax or carbon pricing, the fact that you could reveal this to consumers might be interesting cause I do wonder whether that would nudge behavior in a better way.
AnneMarie (01:01:41): I also wonder if you could do that with online shopping. So first and foremost, to gripe with the supermarkets, they could just let me put my allergy in at the beginning and then delete all the other products [ ] but what would be interesting for me is also when I go to, say, one of the big internet platforms and I purchase whatever I want to be sent the same day or the next day, I need to know where that's from, what's the carbon cost of me choosing one option over another and I don't currently have that option. If you go shopping online, why can't you say, well, actually I'd like you to tell me what the lower carbon option is versus the things I've chosen in my shopping basket to encourage that kind of climate outcome. So it's not nudging, it's given me an option and it's empowered me [] as part of the experience so that I can make a choice if I can afford it, which is clearly a privilege.
Ben Yeoh (01:02:26): Yeah. Actually, those are two really interesting ideas. Exactly, you should be able to tick nuts and they don't show you anything with nuts. I mean, that should be super easy really to do. That second point, I actually have raised that with the senior management of Amazon because when they talk about and look at it, when you gather all of-- So you can choose prime next day and it comes one package for a pencil or something ridiculous like that. And instinctively, you know, that's got to be not great on carbon intensity versus everything else. And they show that if you do the group packaging where it's maybe a day later and they group it altogether, and then they also package it with all the others that they're servicing in it that's significantly less intense. And although they give it to you as an option, they don't reveal how much less intense it really is and actually if they did reveal that then actually that could well nudge behavior. So again, you can choose, you could do that. It's part of that, but that information--
AnneMarie (01:03:22): If you could set your default setting to group and then say, you cannot tell if you've got a pressing deadline and you need something tomorrow, but you can set your preferences as a consumer says, I'd rather be as green as possible. So I just think it could be made easier by platforms that they could be easily built into.
Ben Yeoh (01:03:40): Well, that's definitely for the head of environment and social governance, ESG of Amazon, we shall note that. Great. Okay. So, look, we are solving world problems. Let's chat today politically, maybe a bit untenable, but you know, there'll still be out there.
AnneMarie (01:03::58): Optimism and Ambition.
Ben Yeoh (01:03:59): Exactly. Well, they must have thought the same when they were doing really, really big things like trying to end slavery or getting women's rights and stuff, right. Did not look like it was going to happen 10 or 20 years before it happened and then it did start to happen. So that's, I guess, how social change could work. So last couple of questions. Do you have any advice or thoughts for those perhaps wanting to work in the policy area or the areas that you've worked in in terms of innovation, healthcare social change? From your career or life experience is there anything you'd want to share?
AnneMarie (01:04:38): I guess. Well, I'm quite fortunate in that-- I think I've worked somehow I've been and worked with every government department. I think it's at the foreign office[] But I've also worked with every local authority in the country as I have that kind of different view from the kind of locale perspective and how difficult things are doing things that way up and then doing them top down. So I would say from a top down perspective, it's really difficult to affect major change with a massive radical idea, unless you are a politician. I think it's people who work every day in and with the government. It's about recognizing the importance of small non-sexy policy changes and the massive impact that a single line of policy or a small planning circular can make. I think I spent the first five years of my charitable set to career working and trading on one line in the planning circular that helped communities to take over landed building for a pound because it was for social purpose and it made you could do it at an undervalue, lesser market value was the only exception to the kind of public accounting rules. They were quite strict, but it was a terrifically important non-sexy policy that made so much possible across the country.
Ben Yeoh (01:05:49): Excellent. So yeah, that actually working on what seems to be smaller ideas or smaller pieces of work can actually be really impactful. Great. And then final question is, do you have any closing thoughts or advice in general that you'd like to share?
AnneMarie (01:06:05): Do I have any general advice? I think it's just been an inspiring, lovely conversation in the first instance and I suppose my motto is never give up. So even if the treasury doesn't like a sovereign health fund, it hasn't stopped me pursuing it. The likelihood and the chances of it succeeding is slim considerably with each passing year. But the concept and the kind of the spinoff implications of that piece of work have been to get other people to think, okay, if we can't do it like that exactly, how could we do it slightly differently adjacent to that? So it's not that your idea didn't happen. It's that something slightly different happened that's related to it. You can't let perfection be the enemy of the good. So I think all power to those people who are now engaged in that work and I feel power to be part of it. So don't give up cause change is difficult, but you don't always get exactly what you want.
Ben Yeoh (01:06:54): That seems to me to be excellent final advice, don't give up. AnneMarie, thank you very much.
AnneMarie (01:07:01): Thank you.
