Member

On any aspect of public life, if someone is taking a decision, data is needed that is accurate, reliable, focused on the issue at hand and timely. That is true whether you are a policymaker or an individual citizen taking a decision. I was a policymaker—a Minister in the Northern Ireland Executive—during Covid. A reasonable amount of information and data came our way. However, looking back four or five years after those events, I wonder whether, had we had more real-time data that drilled down more into the detail and that was more appropriate to what we sought, better decisions could have been made, either in Northern Ireland or throughout the UK. Obviously, that is a question for the inquiry. As public policymakers, the better the data we have, the better our decisions may be.