PRESS RELEASE : Will Senedd seize chance to give Wales its Covid inquiry? [November 2022]

The press release issued by the Welsh Conservatives on 30 November 2022.

The Welsh Conservatives are urging the Senedd to seize the chance to implement a Wales-specific Covid inquiry on Wednesday.

Mark Drakeford has long rejected setting up a Wales-specific Covid inquiry despite Nicola Sturgeon establishing one for Scotland and then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson putting in place a UK-wide investigation.

The UK Inquiry’s Chair Baroness Hallett recently admitted that its investigation “can’t cover every issue” relating to Wales, prompting concerns that doubts long-held by the Welsh Conservatives and the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Wales group that the UK inquiry would miss out on many aspects of the pandemic in Wales – which would also be overshadowed and overfocused on what happened in England – seem to be becoming reality.

Now, the Party will seek to establish a special purpose Senedd committee to identify where the UK inquiry is not able to fully scrutinise the response of the Labour Government in Cardiff Bay and Welsh public bodies to the pandemic, and undertake an inquiry into the areas identified.

The committee would then have up to two years to produce a report.

Commenting ahead of the debate, the Welsh Conservative Shadow Health Minister Russell George MS said:

“For the last year and a half we’ve tried to make the Labour Government accept that we need a Wales-specific Covid inquiry so people who suffered from the virus and lockdowns – and know others who died because of them can – get the answers they deserve.

“We simply should not be in this position where we are asking for a Senedd committee to do the job of filling the gaps of the UK investigation – Mr Drakeford was keener than anyone to point out that Welsh rules were made in Wales, so why should there be no investigation here either?

“It is increasingly clear that we are here because Labour ministers do not want to be under the microscope and in the limelight, preferring to hide behind the more well-known issues that affected England.

“The exercise of devolved power must be scrutinised and those who used them must be held accountable for their actions and the results incurred. Any politician who votes against our motion puts themselves in opposition to this principle and must justify that to the people of Wales.”

Areas that a Wales-specific Covid inquiry may want to investigate include Wales having the highest Covid death-rate of UK nations, Wales having a higher hospitalisation rate than England, the lack of science behind vaccine passports, and the unnecessary clinically unnecessary Omicron restrictions.

There are also events from the first wave that warrant investigation in a Welsh context but could be disappointingly missed in a UK-wide investigations where England will be the focus:

• The First Minister of Wales saying he could see “no value” in testing in Welsh care homes and the then-Health Minister saying he did not understand the rationale behind it. It was a whole month after mass testing was put in place in England that it was introduced in Wales.
• The Labour Government missing their testing target: At the start of April 2020, Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gething had set the target of 9,000 tests a day by the end of April. But on the 30th Wales conducted just 1,090 tests in a day.
• ICU capacity being critically low: It only took a small number of cases to put serious pressure on ICU. At the start of the pandemic, Wales’ intensive care bed capacity was 153. This is 4.9 for every 100,000 of our population. It was 6.6 per 100,000 across the UK.
• Wales running out of PPE, with a BMA survey from May 2020 finding 67% of doctors in Wales did not feel fully protected from Covid-19 in their place of work.
• Allowing the Wales vs Scotland Six Nations match to go ahead, with 20,000 Scottish fans travelling to Cardiff.
• The long delays in getting shielding priority delivery slots from supermarkets, and sending 13,000 shielding letters to the wrong people.