All right, a quick introduction about me. If you missed this morning's keynote, is there a problem? Sorry, thank you. Oh, it's the speaker notes. Thank you for that reminder. Appreciate it. Sometimes we're nearsighted. All right, it's good. All right, thanks so much. Quick introduction about me. I'm a head of open source at Solar. I've been one of the founding member at the Israel community. I wrote two books. And I'm also a CNCF ambassador. Now I'm going to pass the mic to Ben to give a quick intro. Yeah, I'm Ben, Principal Engineer on the open source team with Lynn at Solayo. I've been doing Kubernetes for a long time and Istio for what seems like a really long time. And yeah, constantly learning. This has been fun stuff. Awesome, thanks Ben. And just a little bit introduction about our company because it's a small company. How many of you have actually heard of our company? Wow, thanks. You probably saw this too at, I guess, Chicago Airport. So that's all welcome. So thank you. So that's my boss, Eddie Lavigne. So we were for this small company. Today we're going to talk about Wazem landscape a little bit how Istio fits in, right? So we were working from the Istio project. We primarily are part of the embedded function of the Wazem landscape. So you can see Istio in there. I believe Envoy proxy is also in there. Kubernetes is also in there. So Knative is also in there. So that's a couple of surrounding projects related to what we are working on in a daily basis, part of the embedded function. So how many of you know what ServiceMesh is? All right, looks like most of you already know what ServiceMesh is. So in a nutshell, ServiceMesh is a programmable framework to allow you to observe, secure, connect micro services. And this is the ServiceMesh landscape by CNCF. You can see, I guess the biggest news is Istio is a CNCF graduated project. And ServiceMesh architecture, you're probably not surprising, it forms the cycle architecture, right? So the cycle does the magic to help you connect, secure, and observe your micro services. So you don't have to write code in your application to do that. So now I'm going to talk a little bit about ServiceMesh evolution. In 2017, interestingly enough, when LinkedIn won first launch, I believe it's at the KubeCon in Austin, it was the only KubeCon that has a little bit of snow, right? And they announced this project called ConDoIt that essentially proposing, you don't need cycle, why can't you just run the proxy per node? But LinkedIn soon find out the cycle architecture is more mature, it has more advantage around isolation, security, so they switch to the cycle model. If you look at the landscape of ServiceMesh, most of all the projects using on-way proxy as the cycle proxy, so on-way is pretty much the de facto standard for cycle proxy. Now I'm going to pass to Ben to talk a little bit about challenges with cycles. Yeah, and a lot of this stuff is going to be old news to some of you. Cycars have been a contentious topic from day one and we all know what the difficulty is with those, right? You have to actually inject layer seven slash layer four proxy into every workload pod to get all these benefits. That's expensive, right? That kind of increases the budget for each and every app you're going to deploy and it means you have to do things like restart the app to inject, you have to, you know, adopting a ServiceMesh is an expensive thing that requires you to recycle the applications you actually want to handle. And that's just a burden that people have been trying to get away from. So the idea is, hey, maybe we can get rid of some of this complexity, right? Maybe we can remove some of this burden here on the disruption and the burden on the workspace and the applications as well. And people talk of things like, you know, maybe we can do things like move this to user space or move this out of you, move this proxy information and functionality out of user space into kernel space, right? Stuff like security, stuff like policy enforcement. Can we do these things? Just get rid of the user space proxy entirely and do them all in EBPF. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work because EBPF is not designed to do most of the things that a high level Layer 7 user space proxy can do. Stuff like encryption, just not gonna happen in EBPF. I've done EBPF, I've written EBPF modules. It's really not designed to handle that higher level stuff. Up to Layer 4? Sure. But Layer 7 stuff, it's just not really feasible to actually move all of that stuff out of user space into kernel space. So what can we do about sidecars, right? The difficulty of course with Envoy is, you know, tenancy and figuring out that issue for how to have tenancy, right? If you have a shared proxy, how do you avoid noisy neighbor? How do you avoid churn? How do you avoid all these issues that people have with a shared proxy between workloads? And there's been some research into this, but generally the way you wanna do it is by splitting functionality. All right, thanks Ben. So I'm gonna talk about slicing the layers, right? Because the Layer 7 proxy is not designed for multi-tenancy. So what we come up with the right architecture in the Istio community is slicing the secure overlay layer which is a Layer 3, Layer 4 into a separate layer than the Layer 7 processing layer. So as you can see, this allows us to have a secure overlay layer to be a per node proxy while you can have dedicated Layer 7 proxy for whatever tenant scope that you feel comfortable whether it's per name space or per service account. So in a nutshell, the secure overlay layer is very similar to the per node proxy where LinkD1.org was doing in 2017, but it's only handles the Layer 4 functionality where you potentially feel more comfortable to share with the other applications from different tenancy. So all it does is the Layer 4 here, basic security, mutual TLS tunneling, TCP metrics and logging, and also basic TCP routing. The Layer 7 processing layer, you get all the functions you see in the sidecar today. That's Layer 7, resiliency, traffic, shifting, canary, big upgrades, reach Layer 7 authorization policy, Layer 7 request telemetries, so all that function is a scope to your tenant scope which in this case is based on your application. So you don't have any noise neighbor problem, you don't have any cost attrition problem by having your dedicated Envoy proxy handles Layer 7. Istio, you guys all know Istio. By the way, how many of you are actually using Istio today? All right, how many of you heard of Istio Ambient Service Mesh? All right, very cool. So just a quick update in the community, we launched Ambient in 2022 and in the community we're working very hard to reach Ambient to beta right now. It's still in alpha status. We're trying to close a couple of key functions before we get to beta. Last year we launched Ambient and the founder of Envoy, which is a math client, said this is the right architecture going forward with the separation between Layer 4 and Layer 7 and be able to move in the sidecar outside of your application. So we did launch, this is our launch blog. As if you read the blog, Ambient is essentially focused on simplified operation, reduce cost and be able to improve performance for you. Now I want to show a little bit of progression of wasm in Istio. So when we started with Istio, we started with the mixer component and we were able to support wasm using Envoy filter resources and then we remove our mixer. If you guys know Istio well enough, we added support for wasm around time in the Istio proxy. We started with Solo, was talking about wasm deployment resource and that become a standardized resource with a lot of more work from the community become the wasm plugging resource and now the community is looking at adding wasm plugging resource to Istio Ambient service mesh. So a quick introduction of wasm plugging resource. How many of you actually use wasm plugging resource in Istio? All right, thanks a few of you. So it's actually really easy to use. It's declarative. So you can select which workload the wasm plugging is going to apply to. You can specify its faces, its images. You can set the environment variables. So all that configuration is available for you. What essentially works behind the scene is as a user you deploy wasm plugging resource and it's deployed to your Kubernetes cluster and Istio D monitors wasm plugging resources and pushes the configuration down to the Istio agent which typically runs alongside of your Istio proxy and that proxy could be your Psycop proxy and could be the Waypoint proxy that handles layer seven processing in Istio Ambient service mesh. And if the Istio agent doesn't have the wasm image it's going to go out to OCI registry to register the image and then provide config the proxy which is on way to execute the wasm image at the right time and window that's per your wasm plugging spec. So this is how the sequence work with one, two, three, four, five that I just described. Now a little bit more about wasm and Envoy. So Envoy has wasm extension natively built within Envoy. You can do basic configuration for wasm plugins through Envoy. You can configure your Envoy wasm VM which is runtime that V8 and you can also configure environment variable for your Envoy wasm VM. So that's all possible through Envoy configuration. With that we're going to show a quick demo and apologies because of my machine had some problem from the keynote early on so I couldn't do a live demo for my machine. So luckily I did get this recorded on Friday night before the trip. So what I'm showing is I have a simple project using assembly script. As you can see this project essentially does is adding a simple header. So in this add header commands class and method what we're going to do is we're going to say hello wasm day 2023 North America, KubeCon as part of the response, add this to the response headers. And I'm going to also run this, I'm going to build this, actually I already built this code using the right tool and it produced the wasm binary called optimized wasm and now I'm going to try to run this using Docker. So you can see my Docker compose file really simple. I'm using Envoy, Davy image of Envoy and I'm launching two volumes. One is my Envoy configuration, the other one is the wasm binary. So for the Envoy configuration you can see I have listener, I'm listening on 10,000, a set up of HTTP connection manager and all it does is it returns have a nice day in the body. So that's my HTTP connector filter. I also have a wasm filter which is my HTTP filter and in this wasm filter, I'm setting up runtime.v8 as my runtime and I'm adding a header which runs the optimized wasm file and last of the list I have a router filter which is required for the Envoy filter to be the last one. So as you can see, I'm running Docker compose to start my Envoy and now what I'm doing is I'm going to curl the local host 10,000 port and so you can see here is my hello wasm day 2023, North America, KubeCon. So that's my wasm binary gets executed and you can see have a nice day at the end too. So that's essentially in a nutshell of how Envoy can be work with wasm to execute our wasm runtime. Now I'm going to pass onto Ben to show a more exciting demo about how Envoy is still with ambient work with wasm. Yeah, well I hope it's more exciting because if it doesn't work since it's live we're gonna have problems but it's all good. All right, so let's see if I can. Hopefully this is visible. Can you? Yeah, sorry about that, I should have done that one. Okay, so first what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try to actually install Istio in ambient mode. I'm gonna try to install it on top of an existing application, show that application works before and after then I'm gonna actually apply a wasm filter to change the behavior of the application without having to restart any of the application pods. So if we look at what I got in this cluster right now it's the standard Istio book info app. Now there's no Istio, there's no Istio namespace, none of Istio's installed, it's just a plain cluster with a couple of web services and I'm gonna go ahead and port forward this guy so we can get to it. And just to kinda show you if you've not seen it it's a simple bookstore app, a couple services, right, a front end app that calls a book info details service and a book info review service and then if you go to a particular page it shows you the details from the details microservice and the reviews and the reviews microservice standard stuff. Right, the interesting thing here is that we've got an Arthur SSN in the details and this is a problem because this is leaking PII and for some reason when we try to tell the team that operates this details app they're like, no, you can't restart it. You can't mess with that, it's a critical app and you can't touch it. So you're like, okay, what do we do? We still gotta do something here. All right, so what I'm gonna go ahead and do is I'm going to make sure I did the restart order. Yes, I'm gonna go ahead and so I've got book info already in there and I'm gonna go ahead and install Istio in ambient mode creating the namespace and just using this thing. Okay, so now we're going to sit here and hopefully this will be fast because I locally loaded the images. So we've installed in this cluster Istio now. So we have the existing book info stuff which has been there for 16 hours and then we've got Istio in ambient mode which is CNI on the agent, Z-Tunnel which is the layer four proxy and an Ingress Gateway and IstioD and that's about it. Now, what I'm gonna do here, can get to it, nope, wrong. What I can do here is I'm gonna go ahead and turn on ambient for that namespace. So all our book info stuff is deployed in default, the default namespace, right? It's all there. So I'm gonna go ahead and now ambient is, Istio is installed in ambient mode but it's not capturing anything yet because we haven't told it what namespaces we want it to start handling the networking for. So we're gonna do that with this label on the namespace of default. Okay, there we go. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and port for it again and we should make sure everything works correctly. Still, after we installed Istio and captured stuff. Do-do-do, all right, no user, all good. And just to prove that it actually worked, let's see if we can actually get some logs. Let's see what's in Istio system. System, yep, okay. And let's look, so these and these, all these, let's see, product page is on Worker 2. So let's look for the Z-tunnel in that node. Okay, which one is that one? That one's ZH, okay, two HH, okay. So we should see something in here. Yep, see there's 9080. So it's actually going through, the traffic is now going through the Z-tunnel after I installed Istio. And you'll notice that none of the app pods have restarted, right? So we went from nothing being captured and redirected through these node level proxies to they're being redirected. That's cool now. So what can we do about this SSN? All right, well, Z-tunnel is layer four. We want to do this at layer seven. We want to actually read the HP request and it redact this thing. It's kind of a monkey patch thing. So let's try that. So the first thing we're going to do is go ahead and apply a waypoint, which is a layer seven proxy. And what that's going to do is in the default namespace next to the workload, it's going to create an Envoy proxy, which is purely for layer seven and which is bound to the service account of the details app. And recall, details here is the one returning the SSN. So now that we've got that, it should be healthy. There it is. Okay, so now what I'm going to do is reload this page to make sure that actually, oh, I've got to reload it again, forward, forward. Now if I reload this page, we should see everything just as it did before. If I check the Envoy logs, you would see that it would be going through Envoy, but we're going to prove that more effectively here by going in and applying this Wasm plugin. Now this Wasm plugin essentially is just a tiny go app that detects VREGX, the SSN in the request body, and then blanks it out, okay? So I'm going to go ahead and apply that. And just to kind of show you what this Wasm plugin is, it is, again, the Wasm plugin resource that Lynn just talked about, it's pulling an OCI image from a repository. It's just going to actually redact that. Okay, so now if I go over here and refresh, whoop, oh, it redacted. Yeah, and just to kind of prove what I'm talking about here, again, go back, look at our actual app pods. None of them are restarted. Didn't have to touch them. I don't often have sidecars either. None of them have sidecars either, right. So we were able to take a Wasm plugin and actually apply it to something without touching it in a pretty effective way, right? Wasm plugins are not new. Envoy integration with Wasm is not new, but adding that to ambient gives you this ability to quickly do things like jump in there and change stuff without having to run afoul of, oh, I don't want to restart this app, right? I don't want to touch this app. It's much more lightweight, low touch. So yeah, that's it. Awesome, that was a super cool demo. One other thing I want to highlight during Ben's demo, as you can see, the waypoint proxy is optional, right? If you just come to Istio Ambient, you need a layer for functionality, you need mutual TLS, you need encryption, you need FIPS compliance, you don't need to deploy waypoint. However, since we're at Wasm, if you need layer seven processing, you could optionally deploy that. So that's super cool. To summarize, Istio supports Wasm natively with PsyCut today. Istio Ambient introduced a new data play mode to allow you to enroll your application into the service mesh without using PsyCuts. You no longer need to recycle your application parts, like Ben showed in the demo, right? There's no PsyCut running alongside of your application part. It's still possible using Ambient to support full future set of existing layers. Proxy, the differences, you run the waypoint proxy outside of your application part. And then what's super neat is you can inject layer seven Envoy Wasm plugin without touching the application part, right? So your application part can stay running. Well, Istio waypoint proxy executes your Wasm images for you within the V8 runtime within Envoy. So with that, I think we have a few minutes for questions. I want to thank you all for attending. And this is the QR code to get to our survey feedback. So if you guys have any questions, we'll be here for two minutes and we'll also stay around a little bit after the talk. First, a big thank you. Questions? I've got a question. This idea of service mesh is always really resonated with me because it's very similar to what I think WebAssembly is trying to do and pull complexity out of your apps and put it on a common rail. Are there plans to adopt the WebAssembly component model? I don't think there are currently in a concrete way, but I think that that's one of, actually I missed that talk earlier. I wanted to go to the component model talk for Wasm, but yeah, I think that's something that definitely as people use these things more, that's something to definitely look into because I think it's a market improvement over the status quo. Yeah, I agree with Ben. I think in our community, that's a new thing. We're trying to learn what it is and how does it apply to service mesh. But for now, I think getting the ambient out, be able to support Wasm within ambient is probably like the first thing we want to focus on and then look at the component model to see how it could potentially impact us. Yeah. That's great. That prompted some questions. Let's go. Great talk, thank you very much. So my question is like a little on the meta side of this. So effectively what you were doing here in this demo, in particular, you were hacking with an application really. So my question is, what is this authorized as an integral part of the application? How I can protect that integrity from somebody coming in, writing Wasm model and basically changing the way my application works? That's a great question. I mean, not everybody have authority to deploy resources like Wasm plugin resources, right? So you typically in Istio, any of the customer resources in Kubernetes, you can set access controls around it. So not everybody can go to a cluster to be able to do, like if you are able to deploy an application part, doesn't mean you can deploy a Wasm plugin resource to be able to targeting a particular application. And the other thing I would say, I believe these customer resources are only applicable within the current namespace you have access to. So if you have access to namespace A, doesn't mean you can deploy Wasm plugin resources to namespace B, and then selecting the application in the namespace. Yeah, and it is a contrived example, right? Just kind of show you visually what's happening. But like, yeah, Kubernetes has RBAC to prevent you from, to let anyone running the cluster set up, who can do what, who can change what, who can apply what to what workload. That's all built into Kubernetes that's existed for a while. This follows that paradigm. The other thing too is that since now that you can deploy Wasm images as OCI, that opens up much more robust things around like, you know, signing those artifacts and making sure that only signed images that actually mutate behavior are deployed in the cluster and being able to prove that kind of thing, right? Those are the, actually moving that stuff into the OCI layer is like a pluggable image. I think it really makes that a lot easier to control than it was before, where it was maybe just an engine X config floating somewhere, right? All right, thank you. Yeah, great question. Thank you. That's a good question. Who's next? Oh, there's a question there. Oh, sorry.  What languages SDKs do you support? Do you have to build out these for everything you want people to be able to build in their language for? Or could you maybe talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think the, I think the on voice support is pretty robust and pretty much anything that, you know, and rust all those sort of things, whatever is a standardized target. So any wasm binary that can be published as an OCI artifact should work, and any language that targets that should work. We've tried a few things, go is the most common one, but I think some of them they have tried rust. I don't know, but yeah, it's on voice implementation is pretty robust there and it shouldn't require any finagling if you're using a relatively good target. Yeah, we also have a assembly scripts version for the demo that we didn't show, but it's similar functionality, yeah. So maybe a follow-up question to that, and then I'll come to you in the green shirt here. If you had, if you published a wazze spec for this, then wouldn't you get your SDKs for free for all the languages? Yeah, that's probably true, something to look into, yeah. Awesome, here you go. Again, great demo. Can you tell me about a few ways we can troubleshoot a wazze plugin if we create one and we see if something's wrong, what's a good way to troubleshoot those plugins? That's a great question. I can take a step at it. Troubleshooting is actually not the easiest way because when I first tried this, it actually didn't work with Ambient. So I had to troubleshoot him by looking at the on-way configuration and think out what potentially goes wrong. And the other thing I did was I enabled the debug logs for Envoy and then try to think out like the stages we were trying to show in Istio, right? Which stage is failing? Like I have to think out does the binary, was the agent able to download the binary? Was the binary able to get executed in Envoy? Does the IstioD get the wazze plugin resource? Do I have the right access control and privilege to do things? Yeah, it's like different hops in here could be wrong. So I had to, like in the cases I was debugging, I think three and four had some problems. So I have to keep looking into that. I don't know if anyone want to add anything. Pretty much it, right? It's making sure the OCR artifact is actually pulled and pullable if that works. If Envoy says it did that by checking the logs, then at that point it's like, yeah, I burst around info like logs from the actual wazze plugin to see what it's doing. And yeah, where do we see the logs for the wazze plugin? Are they a part of the, are they a part of IstioD? It's part of the Istio proxy log. So if you're running Psyche, it would be part of the Psyche log. If you're running NBN, it would just be the waypoint proxies log. And then there are ways you can enable like debug version for them. But even without debug, you should be able to see some basic logs. I see. Thank you. Okay, time for maybe one more question. Right over there. Hold on. One question. So I think in here, the wazze plugin is running inside Envoy, right? I mean, in Abient Mesh, we also have that Z tunnel. Do we also have a design where the wazze is running Z tunnel maybe? Because that's where it's going to do layer 4 stuff, whereas this is more application stuff happening. Yeah, we don't have any plans. So if you look at this slicing the layers, right, the purpose of Z tunnel is to keep the secure overlay layer very, very minimum. So there is no intention to do any layer 7 processing in Z tunnel. So if you want to execute your wasm binary, you will have to deploy a waypoint proxy for that. And that design principle also allow us to scale Z tunnel to very, very big scale. Yeah, I hope that makes sense. There's no plans right now to do layer 7 is the only thing Envoy supports and only thing it supports processing for doing in layer 4 exclusively in Z tunnel is not planned. Because again, we want to keep it simple, but that could happen. That could work. Yes. All right. I think both presenters are available for questions afterwards. If you want to keep it going, please join me in thanking Lynn and Ben. Thanks everybody.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment, Dr. Justin Marley, he is a consultant psychiatrist for the NHS in the UK. Chris Ashley, technology delivery lead associate manager and Gail Sarad, applied intelligence lead North America for Accenture. Thank you so much, the three of you for coming on the show. Thanks for having us. I'm really excited about the topic that we're going to have today, which is a home healthcare system for the elderly. I'm going to start with you, Dr. Marley, in terms, can you just provide the context of sort of what this problem is with an elderly person living at home, experiencing loneliness, experiencing isolation? Can you paint the portrait for our viewers? Yeah, certainly. So the older adult population is heterogenous, but what happens is as people get older, they retire from work, they lose part of their purpose in life. Sadly, they lose loved ones in their lives and can often find themselves at home by themselves. As people get older, they start to develop cognitive impairment. It may not be at the level of dementia, or it may be at the level of dementia. And so they become increasingly isolated and there's something called the digital divide, which is basically, we're living in a connected world, which is permeated with digital technology to help connect people. The older adult population haven't grown up with this technology, so they're a little bit disconnected from all of this, which just adds to everything else. So what is the idea here? So he's just described older people who are lonely, who are experiencing forgetfulness, they've lost a lot of their friends and social connections. So what's the answer? What's the solution here? So our mission is to help people feel socially connected in this, it's always changing this digital world and stay independent in their own home for a bit longer. So what we've done is we've made an Alexa skill and web portal. So an Alexa skill is just like an app on your iPhone. And it's really about day-to-day help, everyday little things, so medicine reminders or finding things that are happening in their area and just a bit more independence, a bit more joy day-to-day. So Gail, so what does this look like in practice? So we have this Alexa who is in a person's home and reminding the person to take his or her pills and just providing a little connection. So just describe to me what it looks like. Yeah, so I mean, well, if you kind of take a step back a minute and you think about this as Dr. described, the impact of an individual sitting at home alone and you think about their daily lives and what they're doing. This solution starts by really thinking about what are they doing on a daily basis and what's going to motivate them to get up and get engaged. So, you know, fundamentally, this solution thinks about the process that they do and it's constantly learning the behaviors that they're doing on a daily basis. And as you know, right, there's constant reminders. You start to get forgetful. So there's activities that you have to do and if you don't do, you become stagnant, lonely. And so getting a system that allows them to learn their behaviors, understand what those behaviors are and what's gonna motivate them to wake up, get excited every day, feel engaged. The fundamentally, the system is about learning that and nudging them to get engaged and move forward. The thing I really love about this is, you know, if you think about sort of what we're doing here, you know, fundamentally, we're taking really sophisticated technologies, you know, artificial intelligence and voice recognition and applying it to an everyday process, which is like so exciting to see the application of the elderly, right, adopting a solution like this and being able to reach out and engage through this new technology channel. And it is, as you said, it's learning the behaviors, it's learning the proclivities, but it's also providing a bit of social interaction for these people who are incredibly lonely. What have you seen, Dr. Marley? So what we've seen is from the Hanover project, which the Liquid Studio team in London have been working on, which is some of the work in sheltered accommodation with older adults, and Chris can talk a little bit about that. We've also been trialling it in a young onset dementia group as well. So we're looking at people with dementia across the lifespan, both young and old, and we've had some very promising feedback from the younger group as well. So, yes, how are you using this for people who are experiencing the onset of dementia? So the idea is that, well, first of all, what we've had to do is to start a trial, a pilot study. So we're currently going through the ethics committee process, which is very important for vulnerable adults. We can't just trial a new technology in this group. But we've had a design session with the Liquid Studio team. They've come in and they've showcased the technology within the group, and this is a group of people with young onset dementia and their carers. And we've had some very interesting feedback about how they can communicate with it and how easy it is to understand and some of the features that we've been developing, such as information about the condition that they can access from the home care solution. Chris, I want to ask you about the role of empathy in technology. So here is artificial intelligence, which is, it's not human intelligence, it's not our human social intelligence, but yet, empathy is so important, particularly in a technology like this. Can you talk about how you approach this question? So, I take your point completely. It is AI, it's not a real human, and ultimately we would love it if every single old person had human contact every day, but it's just not the case. And I have sat with people, one of whom is my nan, and genuinely, she was just like, it's really nice to have a voice in the house. My granddad's been dead for 15 years. She's been alone for 15 years in that same house, and she loves it. When Alexa sang her happy birthday, because it was configured with the birth, I put her birthday in, and she was just like, I love it. She says goodnight to it.  I do call her regularly, but knowing that she has that is amazing. So it's giving peace of mind to the loved ones too, exactly. So talk a little bit more about what, so we've already seen great success. Adoption is on the rise. What are some of the things that you hope to add to this application going forward? So we see it at the moment as a companion. So it might be for people with dementia, it might just be for people who are alone and they feel a bit socially isolated. So the Alexa platform is very powerful. It offers a very simple way to do things like radio. If you want to mess around with an iPad, unlock it, make sure it's charged, find your contact, call it. It's much easier to say, Alexa, call my daughter. So that's the things that we have, and that's a great service. What we can add very quickly is IoT sensors. So if you put a sensor on the fridge, on the bathroom door, in the bed, you work out whether people are sleeping enough, whether they're eating enough food, whether they're drinking enough, and you're augmenting that role of the caregiver that comes along and sees, hang on, this person hasn't been sleeping very well at all for the last few days. One of the things we get people to do when they interact with home care is just say, how are you feeling today? And they say good or bad.  Because Alexa has built a rapport with her roommate. Yeah, absolutely. So what you're describing, it sounds like a very user-friendly, a straightforward interface that is perfect for people on the other side of the digital divide, as you just described. So how do you work with technologists, Dr. Marley, in terms of helping the technologists understand where these customers are? I mean, so many, and I have a member of my family who had Alzheimer's, and the idea was meet the person where they are. So if they come to you and tell you that it's Christmas day, and you know, you say, it is, Merry Christmas. But how do you help the technologists sort of get that? I mean, it comes back to the empathy. So in terms of where the person is, there are many different barriers to the use of technology. There's sensory impairment. There's, for example, if someone has a moderate to severe level of dementia, then it will be very difficult for them to interact with the device. So we have to kind of work with carers to work with them. So there's all sorts of kind of complications about taking this out into the real world. And what we're also looking to do is develop a service with the AI at the front end backed up by healthcare professionals at the back end so that we can quickly escalate if there's problems. Because the last thing that you want is someone to run into problems for the technology to be able to detect that there's something is amiss, and not to be able to do anything about it. So I think combining the AI with all of the warning signs flagged up by the algorithms with healthcare professionals in the background, ready to escalate to in-house services is the best of both worlds and gets the right services to the person at the right time. And I think that's only possible through this combination. Yeah, it's an extraordinary story. I mean, it's really been a great conversation. Thank you all so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing it with our viewers. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight, that wraps up our coverage of today's AWS executive summit. Join us tomorrow for more from AWS re-invent.


136 million babies are born annually, and around 10 million require assistance to breathe. Each year, 814,000 neonatal deaths result from intrapartum-related events in term babies, previously birth asphyxia, and 1.03 million from complications of prematurity. No systematic assessment of mortality reduction from tactile stimulation or resuscitation has been published. The objective of this study is to estimate the mortality effect of immediate newborn assessment and stimulation, and basic resuscitation on neonatal deaths due to term intrapartum-related events or preterm birth, for facility and home births. The study conducted systematic reviews for studies reporting relevant mortality or morbidity outcomes. Evidence was assessed using grade criteria adapted to provide a systematic approach to mortality effect estimates for the live-saved tool list. Meta-analysis was performed if appropriate. For interventions with low-quality evidence but strong recommendation for implementation, a Delphi panel was convened to estimate effect size. The study identified 24 studies of neonatal resuscitation reporting mortality outcomes, but none of immediate newborn assessment and stimulation alone. A meta-analysis of three facility-based studies examined the effect of resuscitation training on intrapartum-related neonatal deaths, RR equals 0.70, 95% CI 0.59 to 0.84. This estimate was used for the effect of facility-based basic NE. This article was authored by Carlo Waldemar, A. Dan Stadt-Garriel, Nehemiah Sison, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Thanks for checking out this unboxing video. This is the January BAM box horror box Yeah, it's kind of late I actually just got it yesterday and it's like two weeks later So so the US Postal Service apparently messed up and had sent them some items We'll send BAM box some items from one of the people putting it together I don't remember if it was art print or the pins or whatever, but they lost the stuff and This is actually something I've been hearing happening a lot with the US Postal Service recently with subscription boxes having issues with You know getting what they're supposed to be getting or when they're sent out like the box goes missing or whatever There's another subscription box. I'm going to be starting to do on this channel I was going to be doing it in January, but that'll have to be delayed to February because the US Postal Service lost the box straight up even before checking it in so I Was in a contact with people doing it and they were just like Sorry, we can't so I got my money back. So it'll start in February. Anyway. Yes, this is a new table things look different. So Yeah, but US Postal Service aside, we're gonna do this unboxing see how it goes BAM horror I think for this box I know what the autograph is gonna be because they'll usually do like some little teasers online through their Facebook community page In the regular VAM box page So I think I have an idea of the autograph if I'm right I'm gonna be pretty happy with it and I can tell you why All right Tissue paper or my cat. So me excited about that Sorry, I just got up not long ago. So kind of like that's sleeping my Okay, random so I guess I'm fell out of there So the first thing feels like it's a pill bottle.  So it is it's a pill bottle or you know, some people put urine samples in these things They're stool samples. So Totally random thing and as you can see it says Valley drugs Nancy Thompson These are drugs for sleep and Dr. England Which I guess this is a reference to nightmare on Elm Street Robert England being Freddy Krueger and This is I don't like that Hate that item that item sucks. All right. So the next thing feels like a piece of like sculpted clay or something It's really heavy actually see oh This is well done. This looks really good So this is a Pazuzu head people who would recognize this would Recognize it from the Exorcist movie, you know the the great evil Pazuzu. Sorry the lighting keeps getting a little weird so You know It's heavy Like it's nice. It's well done Okay, I like that Actually That's probably where this came from I don't want to put it on the new table because it's kind of sharp so But um, but that's I mean if you're gonna get it like a prop replica, that's actually a good one Not this that is a bad one. So Pin everyone knows I love the pins. Oh the They changed the backing on it. So this one is oh, that's really cool Limited edition enamel pin Salem's lot did I get a one up? This may just be like the way they're changing it for like all the backings to say Limited edition and this might not be like one of the one out of two fifties or whatever, but Salem's lot once again, their pins are always really good Yeah, so the vampire full disclosure. I haven't actually seen Salem's lot unfortunately or read the book So on my list, I mean to get to it. I'm curious though. I want to see if there's a number on the back of here like out of No, there's not so as I assumed This is one of the Normal ones for the box. So good pin as usual the pins are always solid No, one of the reasons I keep getting this. So the next thing might be the art print Yes, our print is by Steve Jenks And it is What is it? I'm trying to figure out what this is. Oh, this must be from insidious Because I recognize the woman in it. So this is number 230 out of 1500 They must have done like two different prints or something if you guys can see The glare is really bad, I'm sorry there you can kind of see it Right there I'm sorry. I'm not big on the insidious films. I actually really don't like them Oh, if there's a key on a finger here, that must be from the newest insidious then that it was in theaters I did not see that one. I have I saw the first two I'm not a big fan of the movies Just in general when it comes to horror, I'm not big on like haunted house or like haunting movies. I'm more into like serial killer or you know, supernatural type killer like phantasm, you know stuff like that So it's just my my preference and then there is I believe this this must be the autograph Yep, it's the autograph. I thought it would be. Oh Thank Thank goodness. Okay. So the item was supposed to be from the film American Mary by the Sascha sisters and I was wondering I was just like, I hope it's not just like a glossy from like the movie like That that doesn't show them because they the two of them if people don't know who they are They're twin sisters who direct horror films and they do a good job and they're very very enthusiastic about Horror in general like very enthusiastic So I was just hoping that that you would actually get pictures of them signed Because they're kind of iconic, especially right now. They're really on the rise in the horror industry. So yes, it is the Sascha sisters It's Sylvia and Jen Sascha This is cool because actually I was at a horror convention kind of recently Actually just last year not even a full year ago and They were there and I considered getting their autograph But because of who else was there and my budget for it I didn't end up getting their autograph, but I was in the same room getting autographs from other people and they were just like Seem like the nicest freaking people in the world like they were taking a lot of time with each fan that came up to them They were signing everything that person wanted. They were like very excited to meet people and they just seemed like really solid people So this is awesome for that reason. I kind of wanted their signatures or autographs and yeah This is a good one. This may this is gonna. I think probably the best one thus far for BAM horror That's really good. I'm very very happy with that And then it looks like There's oh, they're doing a one sheet now for all the stuff instead of like a booklet or the online They tried doing the online and I know I was showing people on my phone through these videos Which a lot of people didn't like that when I want something physical So they're they're now doing like a compromise and doing like one sheet so So they just kind of say that it's a dual autograph basically and be on the lookout for one ups, but Yeah, so nothing nothing huge. Oh So there were two different versions of the autograph that you could have gotten I kind of wish I got the other one because I've seen this picture of the Sasuke sisters before and that one's my Favorite, let me show you See them like covered in blood Yeah, I mean that one's still cool because it's actually I believe actually from the movie American married This was just kind of like a staged photo that they've done together But the covered in blood thing is pretty cool then they had the insidious fan art and there was an exclusive print I Guess the exclusive one was the like blue-ish greenish grayish tones Instead of the one that I actually got And then they had the Pazuzu amulet replica Okay Nancy's replica hypnosill prop pill bottle from nightmare on home street three Okay, I don't need to show you those because you're someone the band box pins Which the limited edition ones were pretty cool Obviously, this is the one that I got This is out of 250 that one's pretty sweet and this one is out of 50. That's really really cool That's a close-up of the head of the Vampire so then they always do giveaways and I've known about this giveaway. I'm trying to win it because That'd be awesome. So it's Reanimator poster signed by Jeffrey combs who played Herbert West in reanimator I really like reanimator a lot. I thought Jeffrey comes did an awesome job and Herbert West was a really fun cool character. So Hope and I win that but Chances aren't too good like no one's chances of winning those are all that great so But it's cool that they do those giveaways. I will say okay So wrap up the pins really nice as usual the autograph is really cool Like I said, this is the best autograph. They've had in the BAM horror box yet. Very happy with that The art print like the artwork looks good. So Steve janks. You did a good job It's just I don't like the subject matter. Like I don't care about insidious. I might see if someone wants this the Pazuzu Proper replica from Exorcist that is well executed looks good and the Hypnocill pill bottle from nightmare on Street 3 Dumb don't like it. But overall a good box. I'm always happy to some degree with these boxes Even if there are a few things I'm not huge on BAM box horror Regular BAM box is still great BAM box horrors. You're doing really well. I'm very happy and I'm sticking with it I may or may not stick with the regular BAM box because I'm kind of trying to like cut back Plus I'm like I said, I'm starting gonna start another box, which is totally different. It's actually gonna be a food item box So that should be really fun But the regular BAM box I will be getting for January that one is also delayed. That's delayed more than the horror box So don't know when I'll get it. I don't know. So sorry about that But BAM box doing a good job with your horror box. I like it. Thank you everyone for checking this out Until next time keep it brutal


any funding for the delivery of plans for a good food nation. Clearly, local authorities have critical importance in their delivery business, and they must be fully funded, both to develop their plans and deliver on actions and commitments, in order to enable delivery of the good food nation bill's aspirations. Members of the committee are aware that the local authority budget has been eroded over quite some years, so it really is quite key and imperative to the fact that local authorities are adequate and sufficient funding to take this forward in a positive way. We do have a resource that needs to be funded. Anything that we are looking at, there has to be an element of funding and there has to be an element that will be supported against the policy and the legislation to be able to do what we have done. I suppose that that is really everything that I would have to say at the moment, but it is looking at how and what would be funded to support this coming forward. For me, the biggest issue here is how we deliver this ambition without adequate resource, and the plan ultimately becomes a piece of paper with ambitions on it. The hard part is how we then bring this to life. How do we make sure that we have someone to meet with farmers, suppliers and producers? How do we make sure that we have someone to spend time dealing with food insecurity and working to develop the local solutions of tackling the challenges that they face? How do we make sure that we have someone who can provide educational and community food opportunities to create change in our communities? Some of that work is going on in small pockets, but to draw it together and to create more of that across Scotland takes time and it takes resource. We would love nothing more than having local food in all schools, care homes and developing opportunities to work in more areas of growth, but capacity is the issue. We can only do so much on goodwill and our ambition alone. We heard that the Government thought that the cost of drawing up the plans for public bodies and health boards was going to be negligible, but the delivery of the plans to achieve outcomes is a different thing. Potentially, if we are procured locally, there is a higher cost to that. There is a higher cost to potentially building the processing network for the food to be used locally. We have seen local authority budgets slashed over the past few years, so local authorities are under immense pressure at the moment. We hear also about the benefits through eating healthier food and cough seasons every year, of millions of pounds to the health service. How much commitment should the Scottish Government give to local authorities to deliver those plans to achieve what we all want as a good food nation? Thank you, convener. That is a discussion that we need to explore in respect of matching the aspirations of the bill. I think that what is being considered so far in some of the discussions is clearly that the capacity to deliver the aspirations of bills for the bill would need to be greater for local authorities to do it effectively. It is not just the consultation part of its operation delivery. It is a co-ordination. The whole series of tasks and work that have been involved in doing it effectively and with different partners. I do not have a respect to quantifying it. I hope that it is much more significant than what it was originally envisaged for. When we think about the current challenges that we have on the food sector and food policy in Scotland, global factors are more important than the impetus that has been attacked ever before to have sufficient capacity for it. I think that this is something that will need to be explored further with local authorities to quantify exactly that. It still needs to be an adequate sufficient staff resource for the co-ordination of local authorities as part of the committee plan and partnerships. I agree with what Mike has said. We know that it comes at a cost. We need to think differently about how we speak about food and what those aspirations are. All too often we think of food as being a cost to be borne or a cost to be cut. We need to reframe that and think about that as an investment in those wider strategies that we have touched on in those wider aspirations that are outlined in the national outcomes. That is how we measure that as a challenge, so that we make sure that we are getting good bang for our buck through this process. However, if we reframe the thinking about that, that has to form part of the discussions also. I think that the value on the plate is what we sort of look at within East Asia. We do have to look at it in more detail, that is for sure. We have learned to live with the additional costs that it would cost us to use local suppliers. We have grown with that over the period of time, but it would not be straightforward for any other local authorities that may have not started that path just now. We have embedded it into what we do now, but it would need a lot more to detail the discussion on that. Thank you, Mark. That is helpful. I would like to hear your views on whether the statutory requirement on public bodies to produce, consult on and publish a good food nation plan will make a difference to what public bodies are already doing. I will start with Jade. I think that that provides us with an opportunity to be more strategic in our thinking about food and how we could enhance work that is already under way. I think that I have already said that food policy is quite fragmented at local and national level, with so many statutory requirements and regulatory measures already in place. The requirement to produce and publish a plan gives us an opportunity to think better about how we draw together all those various policy areas to really change our food systems and our food culture for good. I really liked Robin Gurley's suggestion at the committee a couple of weeks ago for those food plans to be given the same level of importance as other plans, such as health and safety, and if all council and national services had to be more mindful and supportive of food and decision making, that could mean that a food plan could be transformational. When it comes to consultation, we need to consider before publishing a plan about our people, our workforce and how we need to better value caterers who work so hard in our schools, our hospitals and our care homes, delivering hundreds and thousands of meals each day. I would like to talk about how that plan can recognise their role and how we can make that work happen not by chance but through our people. That includes our staff, our producers and our suppliers. We need to think carefully about a time when recruitment is very challenging. We also need to think about our children and young people and the important role that they have to play in developing our ambitions and our plans. That is generational change. Those are the people that we are going to rely on to do the work, and they also have a role around monitoring and evaluating what we do. Ultimately, when it comes to the consultation part, it can be done in such different ways to meet the different needs of various groups, including hard-to-reach groups. We want meaningful participation in that. There has been a lot of learning from the pandemic about how we do that. We should build on that, and some of that has to be done nationally. Perhaps citizen panels and listening groups. Locally, the work that we have already placed with community groups in the third sector, we are very well pleased to carry out that engagement work across communities as well as across our children and young people networks and with our workforce. It is about making sure that we have those links embedded in what we do locally or nationally. The links are in a good position from the pandemic, where people were cooking more at home, I would guess, and we think that we know that. They were cooking more at home. That use in local became more apparent during the pandemic. Again, where the local authority had those links within the local communities or community councils or associations, that allowed us to move forward very quickly during the beginning of the pandemic. That is crucial to where the engagement goes forward, whether it is links within the community, links with other restaurants or suppliers locally. That is how we can join that up in a better way. Do you have any comments? I appreciate your time that is limited, so we will bring in those questions. If there is anything else that you want to add before you go, please feel free to raise it. Go for it. Just to add convener to what has been said, I think that a genuine, very good point about policy being fragmented on food policy. I think that there is some kind of coordination, particularly when local authorities are well placed to do that at a local level. Other public bodies can be considered to contribute to that. For example, prisons and universities, colleges, in respect of them, have drawn up their food plans along with local authorities. How can they strategically respond in a strategic approach to food, in respect of managing staff welfare facilities, food waste and so on? I think that all public organisations should have food plans in place in respect of how that would be feed into a local good food plan for the local authority community plan in the partnership area. The bill provides for public authorities to be designed as specified public authorities, who would be required to produce the good food nation plans. Beyond local authorities and health boards, do you have views on which public bodies should be given this designation? Mike, would you like to come in on that? Yes, I think that, as I have just said previously, there is an opportunity for sharing the duty of responsibility with other public sector organisations to drop food plans. As I said to the universities, colleges, prisons and services that are all involved in providing food for inmates in prisons and for students at colleges, local authorities probably provide food for children and for people in the care sector. I think that that would be a positive move. Section 8 of the bill states that a relevant authority must consult on a draft plan and have regard to any responses. I would like to hear your ideas on how public bodies could ensure meaningful participation in the creation of their plan, especially from Jane, who touched on that already a bit, food workers and those with lived experience of food-related issues. I would also appreciate hearing your views on whether it would help to have an independent oversight body set up before the plans are drafted to support public bodies to conduct processes of meaningful participation and engagement. Jane, maybe you would like to start. I did touch on that briefly in my last response. I think that there will be a need to consult in different ways, particularly if we are looking at a national plan and then a variety of local plans. I think that there is a risk that any consultation, if it is not done in a collaborative and cohesive way, may mean that different organisations or public bodies are asking very similar questions, but perhaps at different times of the same community groups. The co-ordination of activities around how we do that is going to be really important, because if we are going to specific communities and groups, then we need to have all of our questions quite specifically around not just what our local plans look like but what our national plan needs to deliver to. I think that there is learning from the pandemic about how we can do this, some of the work that was done in terms of gathering views of what the response looked like post-pandemic, and that work was done locally and nationally. We should be building on some of that. I think that our local authorities are best placed to carry out a lot of that engagement work through the community planning partnerships so that we are not doing that in isolation, so that it is about that wider engagement. We need to be thinking very critically about how we engage with our children and young people and take them on this journey with us, because, as I said, they are a critical part of that. All the people working in food have to have a say, and their voice has to be listened to, because they are the ones who will come up with creative solutions and innovative ways in which we can create the systemic change that we are looking for here. For me, it is about local authorities, community planning partnerships, community groups, the third sector and business working together to inform and design what that consultation process looks like. When you say it like that, you can see why there could be benefits to having some joined-up and collaborative approach to doing that. I want to address it to Mark Hunter in that case. It has already been asked about this question about having regard. I wonder what his understanding of having regard is. I know that there is a legal meaning, but what he thinks local authorities can do to gear up for the bill or the act, as it will be. It is having other engagements. I know that Jane McLean mentioned about the local authority being best placed to lead, but it has connections with the local authority and the public sector bodies to say, okay, this is what we are trying to do. We are trying to start off with the good food nation. Obviously, bringing that knowledge in the local areas together is crucial. Some of us have been on that journey, and those engagements take place. It leads to other connections to allow the expansion programme or to allow the information to be disseminated throughout the local communities and elsewhere. Briefly, if I may, I have a question about the potential costs of the bill for local authorities and other agencies. Do you feel that the potentials are for spending to save, if you like, given that there is a health benefit here that may have an impact on local authorities' work as well? Maybe we could bring in Mike, if he is still with us. Thank you. I was just about to leave, but the health benefit on local authorities has caught the end of that. I think that I would have to really put the points at how collaboration for any implementation for this is key for the good food nation. One thing about local health benefits is that we are having a local approach that meets local circumstances to address the question that Karen made earlier about different social inequalities across the country and different health inequalities. There is a need to have that local flexibility to meet local circumstances for local authorities and their partners in order to do that. That would be a key benefit of good food nation plans locally and to be in line with national high-level outcomes that are identified for this. As I said, collaboration is a key for this. I think that some final comments that I may provide are required to go, convener. Do not believe that a new body is required to oversee the implementation. Local authorities are subject to local democratic accountability and are also subject to a range of policies. Legislation from oversight bodies are in place that local authorities have to demonstrate compliance to. That would be some final thoughts that I would like to contribute to the discussion just before I depart, but I would like to thank for the opportunity to find contributions to the discussion. I will follow that up on full tansy of questions. Mr Allan, I will follow that up on full tansy of questions more fully and reflect any other comments that we wish to provide to the discussion. Thank you very much for your contribution, Mike. I appreciate you taking the time. We are going to explore that topic a little bit further. I will move to Jenny Minto to ask more about the collaboration. As Mike has just said, collaboration is key. I think that I also reflect that one size does not fit all. Our local authorities all have responsibilities over different types of areas. For example, last week, we heard from Jill Murie of Glasgow, and she talked about the fact that more than 90 per cent of food bought in Glasgow is being transported there, so it has not grown there. She mentioned partnering with other areas and other local authorities. I am interested to know how being two of the leading authorities in the collaboration around improving food and localness in your areas, what collaboration that you have done with other local authorities? I will go to Mark first, please. The contracts that we wrote for the local procurement were done as a pan-airshire agreement, and any of those local authorities can come into those contracts. It is a framework of contracts, so it can choose any others within that framework, or it can choose not to. It is a collaboration. We share the information and the procurement process with our other colleagues in Ayrshire, not necessarily outside, but that does not stop that opening up even further to our borders, and we are not sure of those places. That is the discussion that we have not had just now, but it is a pan-airshire contract that we write based on it, or they are asked whether they want to come into the contract process. Great. Thank you, Mark. Jane, have you got anything to add? Yes, collaboration is so critical to what we do around public sector food. There is no doubt about it. Mark talked about some of the work that is under way across local authorities. Within our Gaelin view, we may not be working across local authority boundaries, I think, partly because of our size and geography. It makes that challenging. However, we do work with our local health board, our health and social care partnership. I have a local care home producing meals for early years settings. I have a hospital producing meals for early years settings, and they also produce meals for a care home. It is about how we can think differently about good food and making the best use of public investment in public sector food. That can be place-based, as well as thinking about it sectorally around school food and hospitals and care homes. What is good food and how we can share that in collaboration with other organisations is something that we should be embracing as part of this rather than having separate plans that may not cross over. Particularly around school food nationally, in Scotland, we are considered to be leading the way in how collaborative working can be successful. There is a lot of partnership working that we see between local authority caterers through organisations such as assist FM and APSI and how we collaborate with Scottish Government civil servants, Education Scotland, Food Standards Scotland, our existing supply chain, trade unions and the various food and drink stakeholder groups that we regularly engage with. We begin to see successful models of how sharing of best practice already exists, but we tend to keep that under the radar and do it without shouting about it. I think that that is something that plans will enable us to do as well as to be clearer about some of the good work that we have under way. That is before I even touch on the work that we do with our children and young people to improve school food or with our communities around community food. I would like to ask whether you believe that specified functions that relate to food policy areas and are being driven by the Scottish Government should be co-ordinated via primary legislation, such as procurement, supply chains, green spaces, allotments, food education, fair work or other very important strategic goals that we want to create a healthy and sustainable Scotland, including net zero. Should that legislative footing be put in place, given teeth, or should it be dealt with with secondary legislation? I honestly do not have a view as to whether it should be primary legislation or secondary legislation. I think that Mike would have been best placed to give a view on that. However, what I do think is what that looks like needs to be developed between local and national government. We need to be clear about that. I think that the definition of those specified functions is to be as broad as possible so that we are inclusive to all of those delivery areas that we see within the bill. That leads right up to how we deliver the national outcomes. From a local authority perspective, I think that it should include all areas of business within which a local authority is engaged. To have that whole system improved, we need to regard for all those functions within that system, including education, planning, housing, waste, economic development, procurement, transport, social care and community wealth building. It is how we define that and where that should sit within the legal framework. It needs further discussion with local government. Mark, do you have any views on that question? No, it is somewhere, Jane. I do think that there has to be that sort of connection between all the different departments within the local authorities. I would not give a view on whether it should be primary or secondary, but I think that those specified areas should be quite extensive and that it covers the majority of things that we would need to look at in a good foundation bill. How much engagement do you expect to have with regard to that specific question? You want to flesh it out. What expectations do you have of your engagement? I cannot hear you, Mark. The engagement itself, as we said earlier on, all local authorities are on different routes of this path and going forward. We are quite lucky. I was employed just over four or five years ago to look at food in East Ayrshire and the engagement between education and the other departments. That allowed me to go and do what I needed to do. In some cases I would appreciate that there may be some catering organisations when the local authority might not be able to do that engagement, but we did. We had a very good response from our likes of education, health and social care partnership and other private sectors in the local authority. That allowed me to get ahead of where we were. It allowed us to put a path and engage quickly and respond to the pandemic. If we did not have that engagement, we probably would have been a little bit more behind trying to support the things that we had to do during the pandemic. However, the engagement side of things is crucial to moving anything forward. It is for other areas to recognise that, if the good foundation bill is put in place, it will not have lines to speak to us, but it will at least give us the time to speak to us about how we can move it forward. I would like to ask Jane Ann-Marc, if you have a view on what role the Scottish Parliament has in the scrutiny of the specific bill. I think that it is for public authorities to develop and implement the operational delivery, and we have our own level of scrutiny and oversight from local elected members. However, I think that it is entirely appropriate for the Scottish Parliament to scrutinise the progress of the outcomes of those delivery plans and how those specified functions are meeting them, so that we can see and understand how well the whole process is performing. There has to be a level of assurance that what is being committed to is being delivered, and scrutiny obviously forms a really important part of that to make sure that that is the case. Jane, we participated in the CPG on food, which was excellent a couple of weeks ago. My colleague Jim was there as well. I just wondered if you had any views on the unintended consequences of a target-led approach, which we have already discussed. There was mention in that CPG that meeting targets could put a burden on a lot of food producers and increase the price. George Burgess also said that cost should not be really the only measure, so how do we bring all that together in terms of the pressures that we do have to bear on budgets? That is one of the other significant challenges that we have to be considering as part of this. I said earlier that I think that well targets can be useful and I think that there is a place for them in making sure that we are on the right direction. It is more about having very clear outcomes and indicators that give us that framework to work within. That also gives us the flexibility to be able to deliver things appropriately and locally and to enable the collaboration to happen. If we have too many and too rigorous targets, that can indeed be a barrier to safe implementation, including a barrier to cost as well. If we put too many, for example, we set a target around having Scottish food in local authority purchasing going to 60 per cent. That, for some local authorities, might be a very small increase that they will be able to achieve without a significant amount of cost. However, another local authority might be a huge leap from where they are at the moment. It is about how we make sure that targets are meaningful for everyone and how we can make sure that those targets move us forward rather than overwhelming some people with targets that are unattainable or not reasonable. I think that you make a good point there, because it depends on how puritanical we get over procurement. For example, if something is brought into the country, if it is imported and it is rebadged or reprocessed and a Scottish label goes on to it and then it is designated as sourced in Scotland, if we change that within the nature of this good food nation bill, that could drive costs substantially. It is just a comment on the back of what you just said. I think that it is something that we should be conscious of as well, where that badging and how that looks like can also sustain other employment opportunities through distribution and logistics. Although that may not be a Scottish product, it could be a product that is also supporting Scottish employment. Just before we move on to Jim Fairlie, we touched on the role of Parliament in scrutiny. You commented that local authorities have a process where elected members will, no doubt, be expected to approve your good food nation plans when they are eventually developed. Given that, at the moment, much of the content of the good food nation plan will be in secondary legislation, which lies very little scrutiny, do you think that the Scottish Government's plan should ultimately come to the Scottish Parliament for approval and further scrutiny before local authorities are expected to pay regard to it? I apologise, convener. I wouldn't be in a position to give a good answer to that and I would like to consider it further and give you a response if that is all right. Mark, do you have any thoughts on whether the Scottish Government plan should come before Parliament before it comes into force? I would tend to say yes, in my own opinion. What we haven't pitched on a lot of it, and I would just like to bring this up, I don't know whether it's going to be questions on it. When you talk about the costs to the health, then we know that the rural areas, the higher costs rural areas, need healthier. We know that, that's a fact. We can also control what happens within a local authority, but we don't. We're out of control of what happens outside the school gate, for instance, within those other sectors. I think that I would like it to come to the Scottish Parliament first and then lead back to the local authorities. Thank you, that's useful. Jim Fairlie. Just reversing a wee bit back to what Rachel was talking about and the aspiration. One of the things that I do remember from my very early years of involvement in this is that the public procurement used to be about pens per unit. Now it's about value for every pound that you spend, as opposed to basically based on the price. What we're trying to do here is a big thing, a cultural shift. I'm pretty sure that the plan or the ability that we have is a two-year review. Is that two-year review enough for us to be able to start the road, get it implemented, look at it in two years' time and say, yes, these are the changes that we now need to make in order to take it further? Given the diversity of the number of local authorities right across the country in terms of where they are sitting right now, with where they are starting out from. Jane, I'll come to you first. I think that there is a risk that if the reporting frequency is too tight, that becomes a burden, a bit like the targets where you spend all your time reporting rather than doing the work. I do think, of course, that it's perfectly reasonable to expect public authorities to report on their progress and to be held accountable for implementing the actions that they're committing to and their plans. As I say, that will take time to bed in, to get resource available, should it be funded to do the work that's needed to move the plans forward. It depends on what some of that looks like, but to deliver change, we need to be reporting on progress. I think that it's going to be a long-term commitment that will be at least generational and monitoring progress every two years is an appropriate starting point. However, I think that there should be reasonable flexibility to be able to say that, actually, as long as we understand that, after the initial two years, we only may be seeing very small incremental moves forward on the understanding that it's heading in the right direction. That kind of emphasises the point that I was trying to make, that one local authority may start from a very low base, and then you've got people like East Ayrshire who are starting at a very high base. We can't start the process of every local authority at the same point. Yeah, absolutely. Mark, do you have any views on that? Yeah, I think we don't want to underestimate some of the work that's probably happening in every local authority that just hasn't really been documented or shown, and it will aim towards starting off on the Good Food Nation bill of what they're doing already. Like we said before, we are in different paths, we are in different levels, but I think anything within the two years we have to show some sort of progress of where they've started or where they've been. Again, I say that a lot of the local authorities are probably doing something along the lines of the Good Food Nation bill, just hasn't been documented. You've actually raised a really important point there, is that what this does is it brings to the surface some of the fantastic work that has been done but isn't documented and people don't know about it. In effect, creating the plan, I actually let us see where we are, because there's a lot of conversation about how bad public procurement is in local authorities in terms of not doing enough, but we might be actually doing a hell of a lot more than what we realise, and the plans will actually bring that to the surface. Yeah, I agree. Okay, thank you, Cymru. Okay, thank you, that's useful. We'll now go on to talk about the right to food. Beatrice Wishart. And I've got a couple of questions, which I'll roll into one. So, I'd like to hear the panel's views on whether the right to food should be incorporated or, otherwise, through the Good Food Nation bill, and if you feel it could be incorporated, how you think that could be achieved. Secondly, if there was a right to food, if it was statutory, what implications would that have for the work of public authorities and their plans, their Good Food Nation plans? Jane, do you want to kick off? Yes, thank you, convener. I don't think we can talk about any actions to create systemic change without thinking about our most vulnerable households and those who have either insufficient income to meet the food needs or who are food insecure by virtue of where they live or their own personal circumstances, whatever they may be. There are significant disparities in how we think about food insecurity and if we don't ensure that there is some crossover of policy around the right to food and the Good Food Nation bill, we aren't thinking about that wider systemic change. For me, that doesn't necessarily mean that a right to food shouldn't be firmly within a different legislative framework, however it absolutely has to be strengthened, in my view, as part of the Good Food Nation bill. There are very significant implications for public sector food around this. We have very many lessons learned about different needs and responses, particularly as we emerge from the pandemic and more people are finding that they are struggling to cope with the cost of living and rising food fuel and energy costs. How we implement a right to food and how we require a local authority to support households will mean different things. Firstly, we have the issue of those who just can't afford good food due to lack of income. Local authorities working with national government have a very important role to play in supporting households who are financially insecure. However, there are also people who face food insecurity as a result of scarcity, as a result of living in rural and remote areas, who are adversely affected by supply chain issues that, at the end of very long supply chains in some places, put shortages that we are coping with in the public sector too at this moment in time. Transport issues from driver shortages, road closures and ferry cancellations are things that some of us have to cope with regularly. For those people, although in those circumstances it may not be a lack of income but a lack of access, that again takes local and national support to try and overcome some of those issues and challenges. Similarly, we have people in our communities who are dealing with food insecurity and it is about their inability to travel to get it or due to illness or age, they may struggle to cook, they may have lost interest in food due to loneliness and social isolation and I know that Tilly gave evidence a couple of weeks ago about that. For local authorities and community developing plans for all of those types of responses, ranging from lunch clubs and wheels and wheels to tackling transportation issues, those are all things that I think need to be addressed and a right to food will assure that and we need to think about how that fits within the good good nation bill. However, as I say, some of this is about partnership and how those local and national plans talk to each other and how we can use them as drivers to make sure that we create dignified and sustained strategies that support people dealing with food insecurity, no matter what the reason for it. Thank you, Jane. Mark, your thoughts on the right to food? Again, I agree with everything that Jane said. I think that it should work in parallel with anything that is being produced over and above. The access to food we know can be an issue for some people. We do see a difference in the ones that are on low income and benefits than the ones that are on low income only and are not entitled to any benefits. It is that access to food that needs to be looked at and addressed. Again, in addition to where we work within local authorities, that access can be as simple as a community order in some cases. However, it is allowing that engagement to take place, but I see that the right to food and the good food nation bill working in parallel rather than being co-opered in it. I will pick up on the theme of oversight and accountability. A number of respondents to the call for views raised concerns that the reporting and review requirements in section 11 and 12 do not ensure adequate accountability of public bodies. I would appreciate to hear your views on the appropriateness of the reporting and review requirements. I think that we touched on some of that earlier around the reporting mechanisms and the frequency of reporting on what that can look like. I think that it is perfectly reasonable to expect us to report on progress, and that has to be done at appropriate junctures to make sure that we are able to monitor that. We have also touched on the importance of scrutiny locally and nationally. Those are things that we are very mindful of before we start this journey. I think that it is something that we are used to coping with, because food is not something that has been exposed before. We are not currently measured through targets on the local government benchmarking framework or anything like that. We are looking to introduce a whole new system that will create that monitoring and scrutiny process that does not currently exist. My view is that that should be light touch and that it should be appropriate at both local and national level. I am sure that we are going to go on to discuss whether there is a requirement for a national body to provide some of that assurance. For me, it is important that we have those discussions so that we know what is able to support us to develop real actions for change rather than policing actions. For me, it is about how we can be flexible and dynamic enough to allow the work on the ground to actually keep police without it being curtailed. Many stakeholders have called for an oversight body to be tasked with benchmarking, providing expertise in food policy and ensuring policy coherence, publishing annual progress reports on the state of the whole food system and facilitating public participation and more. If those responsibilities were given to an existing body such as Food Standards Scotland, how would you see that body expanding and evolving in order to fulfil the many important new functions alongside its remit? I think that if we are looking at creating a national body that, as we know, comes at a cost and we have spoken quite a lot today about where the appropriate costs could be allocated to give us the best delivery on the ground, so we need to think carefully about that. That is not to say that a national oversight body is not the right thing to invest in, however, I think that there is a requirement for national oversight and for there to be assurances that local and national plans and policies are in line, are delivering, are complying and are carrying out the consultation that is required. Those are all behaviours that local authorities carry out anyway. I do think to achieve this systemic approach, we need to make sure that cohesion and central oversight are essential for part of that. I can see the value in having something akin to the poverty and inequality commission overseeing this work. That is just an example. If there were to be additional duties in an existing body to carry out that oversight, I could equally see the value of that, provided that it is not just seen as a bolt-on to existing roles and responsibilities. I guess that it is that dichotomy between, should we be creating something new, where we can clearly define what we are looking for from that role, or is it something that we are looking to add on, where we may not have the same scope and ability to be clear around what the intentions are behind that body? The central oversight will be keen for it to be overseen by one particular body, rather than to add on to the Food Standards Scotland. That is all that I would have on that. Again, it has to be detailed enough that the areas that you would like to focus on are focused on, and they are focused on by everybody, not just the public sector but also the private sector. Having that engagement, or even allowing us to have that engagement with the private sector, would obviously be displayed by somebody else overseeing the whole process. I am going to throw a wee curveball into both of yous here. Should the scrutiny be through the ballot box so that we have local authority elections coming up in May and we have national elections every five years, should the performance of the people who are delivering and developing those plans be ultimately decided by the people who are going to be the end-users, and that is the public? I am happy to come in, convener. I think that we need to be clear in our heads about two different aspects of this. The first aspect is the scrutiny element, which is where the political aspect comes in that you refer to, however, a lot of that work will be operational. It will be about officers and local authorities and the NHS and working in partnership with communities and groups on the ground. Those are the parts as well that we need to make sure that we are being measured and dealt with appropriately. We need to make sure that we provide the political oversight and make sure that some of that work is being seen through on its natural journey to achieve the systemic change that we are looking for. Ultimately, we are talking about operational delivery on the ground and what that looks like. We need to make sure that that part of it also has the oversight to ensure that we are assured that that work is delivering. Just on that, I have a little supplementary. George Burgess suggested that there was an electoral cycle that would ensure that elected members would be held to account. That is not the case with health boards, and I think that there is an issue there that it is difficult to hold health boards to account to ensure that their plans are right. I am just going back to the scrutiny. You suggested that we maybe did not need one new body. Are you suggesting, potentially, that local authorities should have an obligation to consult with no other bodies to look at inequalities? You would go to a body to scrutinise your plan on how the plan addresses inequality or food standard Scotland and so on. Does there need to be a requirement for local authorities to do that, or do all those bodies need to play a role in it? Jane, it was something that I would like you to answer. That was something that you touched on. Thank you, convener. It comes back to one of my earlier points about food policy being quite fragmented and responsibility for different areas around food and food policy and statutory compliance lying not just within different stakeholder groups and different regulatory bodies, but within the different directorates of Scottish Government or different directorates within local government. Having that plan gives us the opportunity to draw some of that together to be more holistic and systems-focused and to have that cohesive approach to it. That is why I think that there is benefit in having national oversight. What that looks like, I think, still needs some work and to be determined. I think that it should be like touch, but something akin to the Poverty and Inequality Commission was what I was comparing that organisation could look like in terms of how it provides that oversight. Okay, thanks very much. Finally, we will move to Alasdair Allan for some questions. Thank you, convener. I suppose that it was just perfectly a question, both my question or two or three questions here for Jane Jones. It is about the fact that you have indicated, I think, without putting words on your mouth, that awareness about local authority spending too much time on reporting on their activities with regard to those plans. Does that indicate also awareness about targets? I think that what I have been trying to make clear is that, if we are asking for too much by way of complying with targets and reporting mechanisms, there is a risk that we can spend too much time focusing on those aspects and not enough time on actually delivering the systemic changes that we want to see. If we look at school food just now in the workmark and I have talked about and described over years, we have done that because it is absolutely the right thing to do and the right trajectory to create that systemic change, not because there has been a requirement to report on it or because there has been a requirement to meet a target. I think that those are both very useful and important things, but we cannot get tied up in those being the fuel and end-up of the plans. If I am right, you seem to be quite open-minded about the issue of whether it should be a new body or not that was doing at any oversight of that. We have had a bit of evidence put to us that it is a very cluttered environment in the food world just now. Is that a picture that you would recognise? I would say that that is the case. With the fragmented approach, we go to different people for different things and regulation takes place in different ways. For instance, for the work that Mark and I are doing, we have Food Standards Scotland to deal with food safety. Education Scotland is helping to support and ensure compliance with school food. The Care Commission is involved in monitoring and compliance in early years meals. Yes, there is quite a lot of regulation in different requirements at the moment. Introducing another body could do one of two things. It could either create yet another body to have to report to or, potentially, it could simplify some of that, which is what I would prefer to see. Thank you. Finally, convener, on another issue. Obviously, the bill or rather the plan associated with the bill will make real some of the rights that will be contained in other legislation, the human rights bill with regard to food. How important is it that rights around food are connected with other rights? Again, I asked that in the context of the discussion that we have had in other parts of the meeting today about the competing problems that families have around eating and heating. How important is it that those things are all connected? Mark, would you like to kick off? The earlier committees we heard quite a lot about. For many households, the reason they find themselves, for the food insecurity, is a lack of income. Mark? I think that we have to understand or we do understand as caterers and people that feed people. I have been in catering all my life. Food is the ultimate source, obviously, to anybody's wellbeing. The way that those things are connected is either and the way that we sort of look at it through the food education programmes is what leads them to rely on food at the last resort. Now, normally at the last resort, we know that the last resort is either having enough heating in the house or having enough fuel to cook the food or having the food to cook on the fuel that you have. It is that clear link that we are all these connections that we make with financial inclusion, health and social partnership, dieticians and NHS. That is an important thing that we see down here, links up to that sort of joined-up thinking. It is about referring people at the right time to the right people. Food always comes down to the bottom line, but if nobody knows how to cook food, then they will go for the easier option or they will go for the toast and the jam if they do not really have anything else. We know that. It is really about linking those joined-up approach that we always keep saying about, but where it is good, it works really well. Where you are still on that path, that is the difficulty about joining up with those different organisations, the third sector, NHS, like you said before. That is how I see it going forward. Thank you very much. I have a yes-no question to finish, just based on some of the last couple of questions that Alasdalen teased out. That was on education. Should the plans or should primary legislation state that there needs to be due regard or give recognition to the importance of education in relation to health-eating and making the right choices? We have come to the end of our session. Thank you very much. We were very hard on you. You were reduced to two in the end, but a bit like health-eating, it is not about quantity, it is about quality. Certainly, your answers were of very high quality and will help us in our deliberation. Thank you very much for providing evidence this morning and the time that you have taken to do that. That concludes our business in public. We will now continue our business in private session.


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I'm Helen Euston-Chearman, CEO of Blackie Mart and I had the opportunity to participate in the roundtable today with Prime Minister Modi and it was just excellent. He was more than willing to have a dialogue with us and I found it very productive and we congratulate India on their tremendous pro-growth policies. Thank you.