Covid Bereaved group slam public inquiry evidence given by Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gething

Martin Shipton

A group representing those whose relatives died in the Covid-19 pandemic has ripped into two former First Ministers after watching the latest evidence they have given to the UK Covid Inquiry.

Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gething were both questioned during Module 7 of the Inquiry, which is examining the approach to testing, tracing and isolation adopted during the pandemic.

Mr Drakeford was First Minister during the outbreak and Mr Gething the Health Minister.

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'Enough is enough'

In a statement issued after the two had given evidence, the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru group said: “Today is the day we say enough is enough.

“Our hopes for this phase of the UK Covid Inquiry have been shattered. We watched in disbelief as key Welsh Government figures - Vaughan Gething and Mark Drakeford - faced questioning that was not only lacklustre but demonstrated a startling lack of understanding of Welsh issues.

“The contradictions were stark. Drakeford claimed delays in testing were due to a lack of capacity. Gething, moments earlier, insisted there were no such capacity issues. This was a critical moment—yet the Inquiry’s legal team let it pass without challenge. This was not scrutiny. It was surrender.

“We entered this module with the belief that the people of Wales would finally get answers. Wales faced clear and deadly failings in testing - from the late introduction of testing in care homes to the lack of routine testing for asymptomatic healthcare staff. These delays cost lives.

“And today, we are no closer to understanding why. Instead, we witnessed a session characterised by waffling, clock-watching evasion from Gething, and a jokey, unrepentant Drakeford who accepted no responsibility whatsoever. This is not accountability. This is not justice.

“If the people of Wales cannot now see that Wales is being treated as an afterthought in this Inquiry, then they too are being misled. We are being failed by the UK Covid Inquiry - just as we were failed by our own government during the pandemic.

“It is now absolutely clear: Wales needs its own Covid Inquiry. It defies belief that a government responsible for decisions that contributed to the deaths of thousands refuses to admit any failings.

“How can it be that nothing could have been done better, yet thousands of lives were needlessly lost? Both cannot be true.

“We will not rest. We will not be silenced. The people of Wales deserve the truth.”

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Decisions

In the evidence session, Mr Drakeford defended decisions taken by his government: “I think there is a general difference in approach between the way UK Ministers made decisions and the way Welsh Ministers made decisions for Wales.

"In my experience, the approach in England was to announce first and then plan. So you can announce that something is going to happen, but if you don’t have a plan for making it happen, it actually doesn’t happen.

"In Wales, we took the opposite approach - we planned first, and then we announced, and sometimes that makes us look like we are later [at] doing things than was happening elsewhere but I believe that our method was more effective, it delivered better on the ground, and it certainly I think explains why there were higher levels of trust in Wales between decision-makers and those affected by them.

Frustrations

Asked about frustrations during the early stages of Covid, he said: “Inevitably there were frustrations. They are often borne because everybody is working flat-out, everybody is dealing at full stretch and inevitably there are going to be things that go wrong. Early and sudden arrival of a testing site at Cardiff City football club, the risk there that no plan had been made for the results of those tests to be fed into the Welsh NHS system.

"There was no route for the data to be transferred into the patient record. It was sorted out and put right and so on. I’m content to say that when things went wrong it was because everybody was trying to do things too quickly.”

Mr Drakeford said there was initially no reason to believe that asymptomatic testing was needed, but that advice changed over time.

He said: “This was an evolving pattern in which evidence slowly moves in that position. The early evidence is you would not divert tests that you would otherwise use for symptomatic people.”

Positive tests

Asked by a representative of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru to what extent delays had been driven by concerns that positive tests would mean a depleted healthcare workforce, Vaughan Gething said that wasn’t a consideration: “When I made the choice, I made the choice to say this should be rolled out in the health service. If you are going to implement a nationwide service I don’t expect it to be up and running the next day. When I make a ministerial choice I expect the system to deliver on that choice.

“It’s always possible when you look back in hindsight that you could have introduced the policy [for asymptomatic testing] earlier.”