Public Accounts and Public Administration Committee

Croeso. Welcome to our next set of witnesses, from COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru. This is our fifth oral evidence session as part of our consideration of the UK COVID-19 inquiry module 1 report. Before we begin, could I please invite the witnesses to identify yourselves and your role in the group that you represent?

Bore da. My name is Anna-Louise Marsh-Rees and I lead the COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru group.

My name is Sam Smith-Higgins and I co-lead COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru.

Thank you. Just so people are aware, behind you is a solicitor, Brian Stanton, who is here in an advisory role should you wish to defer to him. We will move on. I remind you and everyone else that the meeting is bilingual. Headsets have been provided for simultaneous translation on channel 1 and sound amplification on channel 2. Before we formally go into questions, I invite you to make an opening statement.

Bore da, Chair and members of the committee, and thank you for inviting us to give evidence today. We appear before you as people who have lost loved ones in circumstances that should trouble everybody in Wales. We are grateful for the opportunity to speak, but we want to be clear from the outset that we are bereaved families. Our perspective comes from lived experience, loss, and three and a half years of close involvement in the UK COVID-19 inquiry as core participants. We have sadly become reluctant experts. However sad our experiences are, we are extremely proud of our group and our drive and determination to get change in Wales.

We have predominantly been the sole Welsh voice seeking scrutiny and answers. We want to emphasise that nothing we say today seeks to prejudge findings, apportion blame or make political points. Our purpose is to ensure that Wales has a credible trusted process, capable of examining devolved decisions in a way that the UK inquiry is not structured to do. Our written submission sets out extensive detail. What we want to do today is speak plainly about the issues that matter to families in Wales and why we are so concerned that the scrutiny falls far short of what the Welsh people deserve.

If there's one message we want to underline more than any other, it's that almost every major failing in Wales during the pandemic can be traced back to a lack of preparedness. When we talk about preparedness, we don't mean abstract conversations about civil contingency structures, we mean something much more basic and concrete. Wales had no meaningful testing capability when the virus arrived. Our PPE stockpile was dangerously inadequate, especially for an airborne virus.

Our hospital and care home estates were not fit to prevent transmission, with poor ventilation, limited isolation facilities, and ageing buildings. Even vaccinations were compromised because of a failure to prep for the known requirement of cold storage. And critically, senior Welsh Government Minister responsible for health and social care had no grip of the pandemic risk, no understanding of the national risk register and had not even read any key pandemic planning documents. These aren't minor administrative issues; they cost lives. In Wales, many thousands of people were infected in the very places they expected to be safe: hospitals, care homes. Our dads were two of these.

This was not inevitable. Countries that had prepared properly protected their populations far more effectively. Even within the UK, other nations performed better. What deeply distresses our members is that almost six years on, we still so no meaningful improvement, no investment on the scale needed in testing capability, no overhaul of PPE strategy, and, despite promises, no credible plan to modernise the health and social care estate. Preparedness failed us once. The greatest fear of our bereaved families is that it will fail Wales again.

Next, I'm going to talk through why a UK-style gap analysis will not work for Wales. We want to be absolutely clear: a process that simply maps gaps in the UK inquiry's work is not fit for purpose in Wales. It is not the right tool, and it will not give Wales the answers it needs. There are three core reasons for this.

First, the UK inquiry leaves more gaps than substance when it comes to Wales. The committee will know that despite the enormous scale of the UK inquiry, Welsh issues have only been lightly touched. In module 2, out of a report running into hundreds of pages, Wales received just seven brief sections. Some are literally one paragraph long. The major decisions taken by Welsh Ministers during critical moments have not been fully examined. So, a gap analysis of something that barely covers Wales will only produce one result, and that's more gaps.

Second, the UK inquiry process was not designed for Wales. Its structure follows the UK Government lines. It works through UK institutions. Its recommendations, especially in module 1, are focused overwhelmingly on UK civil contingency structures, not the devolved systems that failed here. If Wales simply mimics that structure, we are guaranteed to repeat its shortcomings. Wales needs a process built for Welsh systems, Welsh decisions, Welsh data and Welsh public bodies, not an appendage to the UK framework.

Third, preparedness is not a module, it is the story. One of our deepest concerns is that a gap analysis encourages thinking about issues as discrete, isolated items—module 1 here, module 5 there, module 6 somewhere else. But preparedness in Wales was not a stand-alone issue, it was the central reason. Testing collapsed, PPE ran out, nosocomial infections spiralled and care homes became the epicentre of tragedy. If you do not see preparedness as the connecting thread between these failures, you will never understand why Wales performed so badly. A Wales-specific inquiry would examine preparedness as a cross-cutting failure across devolved health, social care, civil contingencies and public health systems, something the UK inquiry structure makes impossible.

I'm now going to briefly highlight some of the key failings that must be scrutinised in Wales that, unless examined properly, will remain unresolved. I'll start with testing. Wales entered the pandemic with almost no testing capacity. Decisions on testing in hospitals and care homes were repeatedly justified with statements that 'the science' did not support asymptomatic testing. We now know that these statements were simply not true. The real reason was that Wales could not test, not that testing had no value. This misrepresentation must be scrutinised. If leaders will not acknowledge past mistakes, how can Wales hope to avoid repeating them?

On PPE, Wales had the lowest stockpile of FFP3 respirators, and most of those were out of date, and they were used even after testing showed a 50 per cent failure rate. On infection control and nosocomial spread—something very close to Sam and I—hospitals and care homes became some of the least safe places in Wales. Our loved ones were moved between wards without testing, placed near infected patients despite assurances to the contrary, and exposed because estates could not support isolation or ventilation. The nosocomial investigation programme, which the Welsh Government launched back in 2022, cost £9 million but failed to investigate individual deaths properly. Our families received contradictory reports, cluster outbreaks were not examined, and the final report was little more than a generic statement of basic infection prevention and control principles. We could have probably written it in an hour. For many of our members, this remains the single greatest injustice.

Every major failing converged on care homes: lack of PPE, lack of testing, lack of GP visits and hospitalisations, lack of palliative care, a dangerous estate, poor ventilation, and policy decisions that treated the older and vulnerable as expendable. The Welsh Government delayed vaccination for care home residents against JCVI guidance by four critical weeks, and authorised the discharge of COVID-positive patients back into care homes, a decision that was u-turned on, despite much criticism. Without a Wales inquiry, these appalling failures and decisions will never be properly scrutinised.

We're coming to the end now. I'm just going to talk about why we need, why Wales needs, why all of us need, our own statutory inquiry. We want to be constructive. We are not seeking duplication. Much of the evidence has been gathered through the UK inquiry, and a Wales inquiry can build on that. It's literally pressing a button to transfer the evidence.

But if Wales does not have its own statutory process, several things will not happen. Welsh ministerial decision making will not receive meaningful examination. The real reasons behind testing delays, PPE shortages and false public statements that were made will not be uncovered. The failures of infection prevention and control in hospitals and care homes will not be addressed. The concerns about destroyed messages, missing records and the lack of candour will never be resolved. And crucially, we will fail to understand why Wales had the highest mortality rate in the UK between August and December 2020.

The UK inquiry has already identified serious problems with record keeping, audit trails, retention of messages and the absence of documented decision making across all Governments. Wales needs a dedicated process to assess how these issues affected devolved systems, and to ensure robust standards for the future. A statutory inquiry is essential because only such an inquiry holds the legal powers to compel documents, require witnesses to give evidence under oath, and obtain full disclosure. Without these powers, crucial gaps in Welsh decision making will remain inaccessible.

Families in Wales deserve more than high-level commentary. We deserve a full explanation, one rooted in the Welsh context and accountable to the Welsh public. A Wales inquiry is not just about answers for bereaved families. It is about restoring public confidence in governance after a national trauma. Lessons learned must be trusted by the Welsh public. The people of Wales need to see a process that is independent, transparent and specifically designed to examine the actions of their own Government and institutions. The legitimacy can only be achieved through a process that is independent, transparent and rooted in Welsh systems and decision making. This is why Scotland set up its own inquiry, and this is why Wales must now do the same.

Some final reflections, Chair and members of the committee. Bereaved families in Wales carry our grief every day, but we also carry determination—determination that no other family should go through what we went through, determination that Wales learns from this tragedy rather than buries it, and determination that accountability exists not to shame individuals but to protect future generations.

We ask the committee to recognise the simple truth: Wales cannot learn the lessons of this pandemic through a process designed for Westminster. We cannot patch over the gaps. We cannot pretend that minimal scrutiny of devolved issues is enough. Wales needs a Wales inquiry—not to score political points, not to relive trauma, but because thousands of lives were lost in circumstances that were avoidable, and because it is only through detailed Welsh-specific scrutiny that we can make sure it never happens again. Thank you.

Thank you for your statement. You've touched on a number of areas that we'd also be seeking to question you on now, but please bear with us, and if you feel you're repeating what you've already said, just please refer back to your original statement. But given your experience both individually and as families, but also your unique role with the UK COVID-19 inquiry, what key areas of Welsh resilience and preparedness do you believe that the inquiry has overlooked or not fully explored in module 1—and I think you've referred to some of them—and how do you believe these should be prioritised to better protect people, particularly vulnerable people, in future emergencies?

Module 1 focused on Welsh witnesses on preparedness for seven hours. That was it. There was a handful of witnesses talking for seven hours. For the UK Government, it was well over 100 hours. I think that tells you all you need to know. We've barely scraped the surface.

I think what it didn't explore fully is Wales—the demographic of Wales, the fact that Wales has a high prevalence of chronic illness and multimorbidity. It didn't cover the geography of Wales. It didn't cover the systems of Wales. It just dealt with it in a very generic way. So, what we got at the end of module 1 in the report was a series of 10 recommendations that are very generic. For example, get better data. We struggle to know what that exactly means. What we were expecting was targeted recommendations for Wales based on the scrutiny. But because the scrutiny wasn't there, therefore there were very few recommendations that could be provided.

Okay, thank you. How effectively or otherwise do you believe the Welsh Government and public bodies responded to the module 1 report recommendations? Which recommendations in the report do you believe have not been adequately addressed, or remain incomplete?

The inquiry has asked the Welsh Government to report back six monthly. So, we had one in January earlier this year and we had the last one in July. Now, the problem is that you have the Welsh Government self-reporting on their progress. We can see or we are being told that the labyrinthine structures within emergency health planning have been simplified; we have to take their word for that. We're also told that there are different groups. But again, what we're not seeing is any evidence of how what they're saying is being monitored, how it's being stress tested. Have any of these things been worked—? Who's monitoring that any of these changes are actually in place, and not just that they're in place, but that they're effective?

We had the Monmouthshire flooding, which personally affected my mum. That didn't sound like the emergency planning and resilience was going to plan. Basically, there are so many questions. We do have a number of areas that we wanted to talk about, but if there's not time, I can write to you on these. But a couple of things. There's a data sharing agreement that's still to be signed with the UK national situation centre. That's outstanding. And the roll out of the emergency care data set is delayed now until autumn 2026. That's a very long window not to have data sharing.

Okay, thank you. You referred to monitoring. What specific, if any, mechanisms do you believe are best suited to track and review implementation of the UK inquiry module 1 recommendations? And what role do you believe that Senedd scrutiny should play in this?

Well, I think we think the Senedd group has every role to play in this. A public statutory inquiry can only make the recommendations. They can't enforce them or monitor them, although the chair has put a tracking framework in place. But once the inquiry is over, that ceases to exist. So, it's very much down to the Welsh Government to be monitoring the recommendations.

Well, the Senedd to monitor the Welsh Government implementing everything, yes.

We've just had—you probably saw—a session with the fire and rescue service and the ambulance service. They were talking about the multi-agency structures in place and new developing structures, monitoring stress testing and so on. What, if anything, could be, in addition to any Senedd scrutiny, you believe, added to or built into those new structures, to ensure that they're not only focused on new ways of working, new outcomes, but they're monitoring the outcomes themselves?

To be fair, we're talking about recommendations from module 1, which has only looked at Wales for seven hours. So, we're pretty sure there should be more recommendations coming as well. The recommendations that came out of module 1 for Wales were—. Well, they were all for the UK, full stop. So, I should imagine that's self-governing, because it's UK-wide, and we're talking about ambulance services across the UK reacting in a different way and what have you.

I've thought about this quite a lot. It needs independent oversight, as well as the Senedd—. Establishing a Welsh resilience commissioner or advisory panel that looks at civil contingency, social care, preparedness, the implementation of the recommendations across all the public bodies—. We think there should be a legal mandate to have an annual pandemic preparation report, and that should be laid before the Senedd. Why aren't there public dashboards monitoring all of these recommendations? Because we're only looking at module 1 today; we have another 10 to go. So, I think the structures need to be in place now to ensure that this is for the long term. Because, at the moment, it all feels very short term, in that what we don't want is a box-ticking exercise, just to say, 'Oh, well, there were 10 recommendations and we've done three of them, but it's too late now to do the others, and no-one will check.' This is important isn't it, not just for another COVID, but it's important for all public emergencies.

Yes, because, for example, you refer to care homes quite extensively—that's largely covered in module 6. That won't be reporting now until late next year, we understand.

If not early 2027, yes.

Right. Adam Price, could I bring you in, please? [Interruption.] Oh, sorry.

Can I come in on this one?

Yes.

Sorry, Adam. You mentioned about the ongoing monitoring of the existing recommendations. Obviously, part of the scrutiny work is the meeting that we're holding today, and, obviously, we have had the discussions around having an independent COVID inquiry, and, obviously, the COVID committee that was set up, which I declare my interest in. But what I'm curious to get from you, in the absence of a committed Wales-specific inquiry, is what you think the scrutiny arrangements should be and should look like from a Senedd perspective, in a system where an independent UK COVID inquiry doesn't exist. Because what I wouldn't want to happen—and I'm sure you wouldn't either—is for this level of work, albeit insufficient from your perspective, is going on for module 1, and then future modules don't get this level of scrutiny and attention.

I think it's just vital that it is scrutinised and monitored and tracked, in a very transparent way, otherwise there's just literally been no point to any of it. The—

The UK inquiry has failed Wales in some ways, in that there haven't been—. We were worried at the outset whether we would be a footnote, and we were assured that, no, we would be a separate chapter. You know, Wales would have a separate chapter, and that hasn't happened, and the recommendations also aren't really Wales specific. So, for the Senedd to—. You've got your work cut out trying to track all of that, to be honest.

But it is essential. There has to be some body or panel that is agreeing and monitoring, because—. And the other—. I think what needs to happen as well is that the recommendations need to be quantifiable. It's very difficult with some of the recommendations, and I know this is done purposely, but, you know, back to my better data, there needs to be something that says, 'What does that mean'? It needs to be specific: what is the definition of better data? Is it having interoperability with care homes and NHS Wales, for example, not just—? They're quite generic, and it's difficult to track them at the moment, so I think it needs to kind of go down a level of detail on what each of these are. Does that make sense?

Yes, definitely. Thank you.

So, I'll bring in Adam Price.

Diolch. Bore da i chi. A gaf i jest ddweud ar y dechrau fy mod i'n estyn fy nghydymdeimladau i chi o ran eich colled, a hefyd yn diolch i chi am y gwaith er y budd cyhoeddus dŷch chi'n ei wneud trwy eich gwaith annog a chraffu yn y cyd-destun yma?

I ba raddau ŷch chi'n teimlo—? Hynny yw, dŷch chi'n dweud yn eich cyflwyniad ysgrifenedig, wrth gwrs, eich bod chi â phryder ynglŷn â diffyg goruchwyliaeth weinidogol o drefniadau parodrwydd Cymru yn ystod y pandemig. I ba raddau ŷch chi'n teimlo bod y fframwaith gwydnwch Cymru, y Wales resilience framework, newydd, wedi'i ddiwygio, wedi mynd i'r afael yn ddigonol â'r pryderon hynny?

I can honestly say we don't know, because we have not been involved in that at all. All we know is what we've seen written in the Government response.

Dwi'n dysgu Cymraeg.

Basically, we all saw the evidence that health Minister Vaughan Gething gave about preparedness, that he hadn't read anything. It was a howling piece of evidence that everybody across the UK—their eyebrows rose watching that. We don't know, basically, what what has happened there. For a health Minister not to have been aware of any planning for a pandemic and to seemingly be okay with that, and for his First Minister to back him up on that seemed wrong to us and to most of the UK. But that's another thing that's been swept under the carpet, and that's another reason why we need a Wales COVID inquiry. All these things have been ignited, but we haven't had full investigations into any of it. And it's serious. You know, it's serious stuff. That's a real negligence of the Government, in my view, that, basically, there was a health Minister who did not read anything, did not understand what would happen in a pandemic. That's scary.

Can I pick up on the now? We're hearing that all is peachy again. I was invited to an Exercise Pegasus focus group about three weeks ago. For those that don't know about Pegasus, this is a simulation exercise for another virus, and this virus was highly transmissible, with the added complication of being transmitted from animal to animal and animal to human, and also it was both droplet and aerosol in its transmission, and affected children more than adults. So, it was very interesting to go to that focus group. It was rather strange. We'd asked to be observers, but that had been rejected. But we were asked to go after the three two-day exercises had happened, and what was very obvious then is that, although we were told by the Welsh Government they have been engaged—they were fully engaged—the exercise was being led by the UK Cabinet Office, the UK Health Security Agency and the Department of Health and Social Care. One of the recommendations of the module 1 report was to have pandemic preparation exercises every, I think it's three years, but that it must be a wholesale one. Now, we've had pandemic exercises for decades, all of which have pretty much been ignored, but the chair said it couldn't just be healthcare focused. However, what appeared from this focus group was that it was very healthcare focused.

And what was most alarming was that they hadn't looked at risk at all. They had looked at the risk of deaths, but not of trading off, 'Do we lock down?' versus 'Do we shut schools down?' What they had done was—. The simulation exercise was that it was on an island somewhere far away and it was going to come here. And their first response was to lock down. Now, in our view, lockdown should be the final response; everything else should have been investigated and prepared for.

So, this does worry us a lot about an exercise that, you know, the Welsh Government and Public Health Wales are fully engaged in, that it's not fulfilling (a), what the module 1 recommendation was, but, you know, we don't know what it's going to say or do. They also couldn't tell us what the scope of it was, the terms of reference or what the definition of success was. It's quite difficult—. Again, it's this lack of transparency and lack of clarity on what's trying to be achieved that we find most worrying, when we've been told repeatedly there will definitely be another pandemic and it will probably be quite soon.

Mae diddordeb gen i yn eich awgrym o greu rhyw fath o gomisiynydd gwydnwch, neu sut bynnag byddech chi'n ei ddisgrifio fe, annibynnol, er mwyn cadw rhyw elfen o graffu ac atebolrwydd o ran cyfrifoldebau gweinidogol. Wrth fod yr amser yn mynd heibio, mae yna berygl bod lot o'r gwersi a'r wybodaeth yn cael eu colli o'r pandemig. Ydych chi'n gweld mai un posibilrwydd yw ein bod ni'n dal yn cynnal ymchwiliad llawn ac wedyn efallai bod yr ymchwiliad yn awgrymu creu comisiynydd annibynnol ar hyd y llinellau yna? Opsiwn arall dwi jest yn 'float-o' yw eich bod chi'n mynd yn syth i greu comisiynydd annibynnol a bod y comisiynydd yna, fel gweithred gyntaf mewn ffordd, yn cyflawni eu hymchwiliad nhw. Ydych chi'n deall y gwahaniaeth? Hynny yw, sut ydych chi'n ymateb i'r ddau senario yna efallai fel ffordd ymlaen yng Nghymru?

There's a huge problem in Wales with Welsh Government and accountability. I think we've learned that the hard way. The fact that a Welsh Government can just simply say 'no' to having their decisions scrutinised is mind blowing. So, there's a huge problem with the structures of governance in Wales.

I don't know what the answer is. I think this is what a Wales COVID inquiry needs to look at. You know, the ombudsmen that we've got at the moment are underfunded, overworked. They've been stretched. Their powers, they haven't really got teeth. If you look at simply the differences—. In England, they've got a patient safety sort of person over there. In Wales, if somebody's ill and you've got a complaint, you have to go through 'Putting Things Right', then, invariably, you don't get a proper response, so then you end up in this mysterious NHS executive. Then perhaps you're contacting an MP, then perhaps you'll contact an ombudsman. And it's all very fuzzy governance in Wales. So, I don't know if one person is the answer to this or whether it is a committee of people like yourselves; I don't know. This is what a Wales COVID inquiry needs to look at.

Can I just say—? The Wales COVID inquiry that we're asking for, we're not asking for it for the sake of it. It is a mechanism, whatever that might be, that gets to that next level of detail for Wales. It needs to focus on the things that Wales needs to do—the problems it's got, or the challenges it's got. So, we're not seeking to replicate a long, expensive inquiry. The UK inquiry has done a very good job on many levels, but we would be looking at a short, sharp, budget- and time-constrained inquiry. Because a pandemic is by its nature clinical, you would therefore have a panel of experts. It could be a risk expert from the aviation industry; a public health expert; virology; an epidemiology expert, so that they—. We know what the questions are, or we know what questions to ask, so they would be much more focused. And as you said, it could be that that then evolves into this 'commissioner'—it's a grand name, and it doesn't necessarily need to be one person; it is a body. Does that help?

Diolch yn fawr. Mae jest un cwestiwn arall gyda fi: ydych chi'n teimlo fel teuluoedd mewn profedigaeth eich bod chi wedi cael cyfle gwirioneddol ystyrlon i rannu eich profiadau chi gyda Llywodraeth Cymru, ac i ddylanwadu ar gynllunio ar gyfer argyfyngau yn y dyfodol?

Absolutely not. We've been played like a fiddle by Welsh Government from the very outset. They've played for time. We basically went in to speak to Mark Drakeford in good faith and he played us like a fiddle, completely. He announced that, because of us, we were going to have this great, nosocomial investigation, it was going to be fantastic, and, 'It's all down to you, well done', and all of this. And then we find out, no, actually, they were legally bound to do that and they just hadn't done it.

From there, I cannot tell you—. I was a Welsh Labour member for 30 years. I went out campaigning for them. I even did their videos for them. They've shut their door on me, Welsh Labour, completely, because I'm saying the wrong things. I'm now saying, 'Look, this UK inquiry is not looking at Wales. It really isn't.' I was in module 4. We had one Welsh witness. That was it. None of what our concerns as families were were asked of this witness, Gillian Richardson. None of our concerns. Absolutely none.

I've said this from the outset; people within the Labour family have said to me, 'Yes, we agree with you, this is wrong.' But Welsh Government have shut their doors completely. They won't even listen to us at all. This is the first time we've ever been invited to publicly give evidence, and we're very grateful for it. But, yes, Welsh Labour have turned their backs on bereaved families completely, whether that's down to not supporting us with a memorial—. Simple things: the Scottish First Minister tweets on COVID Memorial Day about it. We don't get that in Wales. We don't get that. We don't get any support. The Scottish families are in there, discussing with their Government what needs to be done. And I don't know where it comes from. Mike's on his phone now. Mike couldn't care less.

I couldn't care less? I'm looking things up, actually.

You've been on your phone all the way through this, Mike, all the way through our discussions.

It makes me want to cry.

Yes. It's kind of rude.

I was looking things up. If you don't want me to look things up, I will not look them up.

No, you've been like this all through the meeting.

Please could you give us the respect and listen to us?

I will certainly listen to you, and you're going to have to listen to me later on.

But this is kind of what we've felt up against throughout this, is that Welsh Labour think we're troublemakers, we're this, we're that. And actually, I could cry, because talking last night to one of the families, there was an outbreak in west Wales in a care home, and 26 people out of 48 residents died within three weeks. Twenty six old people died. And that's just forgotten. Now, if that were to happen now, if that was 26 people dying in a care home within three weeks, there would be some sort of investigation. Welsh Government would hopefully care. God forbid if it was children. That would be a complete worldwide story and Welsh Government would care. But these people, these people who died in Wales, have just been written off as collateral damage. And it is predominantly older people. And it's wrong. And the fact that you can sort of carry on your work, knowing that 26, over half the residents in a care home in west Wales, died and not one investigation—. To this day, families do not know what went wrong there. And it's wrong, but that's just one example.

All the Members here are here as members of the committee, and one of our roles is scrutinising Welsh Government when it falls within the remit of this committee, irrespective of which party happens to be in Government, so we try to steer clear of party politics, and Members here all have an equal role to fulfil the committee's remit.

Absolutely.

Can I pick up on—? On a positive note or where we—. I agree totally with Sam, and all that, but what we think is a current failing is—. We know more than anyone else, Sam and I, our small group, as we have been involved in this public inquiry for three and a half years. We've seen every bit of disclosure, apart from the last two modules. We were able to feed back on expert reports, we were able to suggest witnesses; we know a lot. It would be so, so advantageous to the current Government, or any future Government, to use us, to listen to us. And not just us—we've got the long COVID group in Wales. There are lots of people affected. And I don't feel like we're being brought to the table. Obviously, there's lots of lived experiences, but we really have quite a unique knowledge. We could really—. Use us, we can help you.

And it's an ongoing problem now. Welsh hospital wards remain the most likely place you'll catch COVID. The numbers, every week, between 70 and 80 per cent of all COVID cases are caught in a Welsh hospital. This is an ongoing issue, people are still dying, and we're doing absolutely nothing. Every hospital ward remains the same as it was five years ago. There's no change.

Jest un cwestiwn bach olaf, jest ar hwn. Pe baech chi'n gallu gwneud un newid ymarferol i'r ffordd mae Llywodraeth Cymru a Llywodraethau Cymru y dyfodol, efallai, yn ymgysylltu â theuluoedd mewn profedigaeth, beth fyddai'r newid hwnnw?

Invite us to be part of this panel or group, regularly, but not just a box-ticking exercise. We are no longer the sad families; we're dogged campaigners and we really do want change. And as Sam said, we've become reluctant experts—maybe over-egging it. Maybe people don't realise this, we're the only non-state group from Wales in each module. So, even though our interest is in bereavement and nosocomial and care homes, we've had to become experts on everything, from devolution to healthcare structures, to epidemiology, to virology, to procurement. And it's not just the breadth of it, we've got the depth as well. It seems a shame not to be utilising that, but having the Welsh lens on that, because everything has been funnelled through that UK lens. So, we sit there saying, 'Hang on a minute, what about Wales?' And we really do. And please know how hard we have tried, over these last few years, to get what little of Wales there is in there.

My advice to the Welsh Government would be to listen. I've said that they've played us, and that's because we haven't felt listened to. They've made up their minds on what they're going to do before they've even spoken to us. Their agenda is set. And I think that advice about listening would do them well next year as well. I know we're not getting party political, but Welsh Labour have stopped listening. They've stopped listening to the people of Wales and what they want, and just carried on with their agenda. And I think that's a huge issue for them. They're thinking about themselves and their Government and not wanting anything to come out. The deleted messages are unforgivable, and we know that’s a big, massive cover-up—of course we do. We know that is. It's wrong. It’s wrong to do that to Welsh people. And it’s wrong to do that to people who’ve been bereaved because of this. It’s just wrong. Where have all the Welsh Government values gone? It’s wrong, it’s wrong.

But it’s back to accountability, isn’t it, and having that framework of being able to agree what needs to be done and how well it’s being done. That’s the most important thing, isn’t it? We don’t just want to be invited to be listened to; we want to materially impact change for the good.

Of course. In addition to our report on this inquiry, when we publish it eventually before the election in May, our legacy report will make some recommendations for our successor committee in relation not just to module 1, but, of course, it will be a matter for the next Welsh Government, whichever party or parties that comprises of, to decide how they wish to take this forward. So, I’m sure that the successor to this committee will have a role to play, with whomsoever that Government may be at that point in time.

You’ve already referred to your concerns about Exercise Pegasus. What specific recommendations or improvements, given your knowledge and experience of Pegasus, would you recommend to ensure that future exercises are delivered meaningfully, and with meaningful learning?

It was meant to be a four-nations joint exercise. It doesn’t seem like it is. And there’s nothing stopping Wales doing their own exercise as well. But I think they need to involve more stakeholders, and it’s just been completely murky. And, as I said, we don’t know what it’s trying to achieve, what the scope of it is. So, I think, to start with, any pandemic exercise needs to lay out what it’s trying to achieve and what the definition of success is at the time. And, more importantly, what happens when it fails? So, next year, when they report on it, what happens when they did x, y and z, but that actually didn’t contain a new virus? It’s very difficult when you just don’t know what something is to be able to make recommendations. They couldn’t even tell me what the fatality rate of this virus was, so, therefore, I was concerned that they hadn’t thought about after-death management at all, which, for a pandemic virus that’s going to kill people—. But that's been a theme—I just wanted to touch on this as well—throughout all of the inquiry. Death has been avoided—what it’s actually like to die of COVID, and, crudely, how bodies are dealt with. There’s been not one person in the funereal industry that’s given—. There’s not been an expert, nor any witnesses from that industry. It’s baffling to us. So, we would hope that that element of it would be covered in Pegasus.

We also don’t believe they’ve considered bereavement now. We are bereaved families, so, obviously, this is what we’re very interested in. When there’s a mass tragedy such as COVID, there has to be consideration for the deaths, but also for all the people that are left behind. And I don’t think we’ve even touched the surface of how damaging that mass bereavement has been. There was little support at the time. We got no support. But I think that’s another factor that we have to think about—how your Governments and leaders need to heal a nation. I do believe that there are a lot of young adults and young people that are probably way more damaged than we realise yet, and I think it’s probably a big problem to come. There’s a complete lack of trust in Governments, public bodies and leaders.

Thank you. Of course, the cross-party group on hospice and palliative care, and funerals and bereavement, have looked at this, and have taken evidence from, amongst others, funeral directors, care home staff and otherwise. But it doesn't seem to have gone beyond that, within a Wales context at least.

It hasn't gone on in the UK inquiry either, but thank you so much for doing that piece of work. It's hugely valuable, and it's stuff like that that should feed into—. Faith hasn't been touched on at all, which, obviously, had a massive impact.

Thank you. Tom Giffard.

Thank you. I just wanted to pick up some of the points you made on Pegasus first, before I come to my range of questions. You mentioned feeling that Pegasus didn't reflect the uniqueness of Wales in the way that it ran—sorry, I'm paraphrasing you, but hopefully I've caught the point that you were trying to make—and that there's nothing stopping the Welsh Government from being able to do something similar if it so wanted. I think, from what I've seen, and you've both obviously seen far more from the UK COVID inquiry, there's that complicated spaghetti diagram of who is responsible to who and all the rest of it. Is there not a sense that, of course, there is obviously an interface with the rest of the United Kingdom, and any exercise would need to reflect that, and is it not looking at Wales in isolation that undermines that structure? Obviously, there's the way that a virus travels as well, during a pandemic, across borders. How would you overcome those tensions between needing to have a Wales-specific focus but also have a UK acknowledgement about the interoperability of those structures?

I think that there's enough for Wales to look at on its own. For example, it has no isolation facilities, no testing facilities. There's plenty there for them to focus on on their own, with their own exercise. But, yes, over to you on Pegasus, sorry.

newI'm a reluctant expert on Pegasus. You're absolutely right—I think one of the problems of the pandemic was that you had England and Wales doing things very differently. The coronavirus didn't transmit differently once it got to the border. And that's absolutely one of the things where we want to make sure that everything is looked at. When you've got a shared border like we have, you can't possibly just think about Wales. But I think what we're saying is that one of the problems, in my mind, on Pegasus is that it hasn't been about whole systems and it hasn't covered the social care system. One of the main issues in the pandemic was that care homes and social care were forgotten, because there was very little data, there was very little interest in it. So, now we've got a pandemic exercise that hasn't touched social care, which is a massive problem in Wales. We've got a very fragmented social care system, either run by a number of councils or privately run. So, it's quite a complex system. What we're thinking of, therefore, is that you would take—. You've got the big decisions and the chief medical officer’s decisions, but then you work down a level on how we worked on discharges from hospitals to care homes, the GP sector, long COVID, which are specific to Wales and specific to that demographic, because, again, what we're going to get, the same as with the UK inquiry, is a very, very broad England-centric report and recommendations. So, we’re definitely not saying that it shouldn't be whole systems, because that's exactly right, but we're just saying that, when there are gaps, and we are talking about gaps here, Wales needs to—. I think what we're saying is that Wales can't just sit there going, 'Oh, we've been done to again.' There has got to be some more proactiveness.

That's it. The aged estate, the NHS estate, stuff like that needs to be considered by Wales as well. They can't sit there, sit back and just think, 'Right, the UK is sorting this out now. We'll play along. They're in charge.' Wales, like Anna-Louise said, needs to be proactive in this.

I wonder what assessment you've made, from the evidence that you've heard so far as part of the UK inquiry and other work that you've done, around the capability—that might be the wrong word—of the Welsh Government, just because of the size and scale of the Welsh Government compared to the UK Government, for example, to be able to deal with a complicated pandemic in this way and everything that goes along with it. Does it have sufficient expertise here within Wales? Does it have the capacity to be able to deal with such far-reaching decisions, sometimes, that need to be made at short notice and everything that feeds out from there? Are those structures in place and is that institutional knowledge in place in Wales?

Absolutely not. We hear constantly from the Welsh Government that it was great that they have a smaller Government because it enabled them to make decisions very quickly and, seemingly, everybody agreed on everything. But that's part of the problem—you need to bring in red teaming, you need to bring in external experts, like I said about risk experts, the people who have real-world jobs and get data. Why aren't we using AI? We couldn't even get GP data into the supermarkets, for example, when we had to give them priority bookings. So, yes, I think there needs to be a lot more external expertise brought in, not just for a pandemic, but for any public health emergency.

I'm stepping slightly outside my remit here, but I'm asking for latitude from the Chair, as I don't think anybody else is going to ask it, so I'll just give you the opportunity. You will obviously have read and be familiar with the Welsh Government's response to module 1. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to respond to the response, I suppose—what your reflections are on the Welsh Government's response to the recommendations from module 1. You mentioned red teaming. I know that that's something that was picked up quite strongly by Welsh Government in terms of an area where, perhaps, there was a little bit of resistance from them. So, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to reflect on their take on module 1.

I think we've probably covered it a little bit before. We're told what's happening, but there's no evidence that it's happening, and that's part of the problem. They're self-reporting that they're doing these things. There's no-one checking that these things are in place. As I said, I've pointed out a couple of things about data that haven't happened. Everything just seems to be very, very slow, but we're always having a good guess. We're having to wait for six months for a report to a chair to find out. It took until, was it, autumn last year, for Wales to get its own national risk register—the only UK nation that hasn't had one for years. They've now got one, but how effective is it? Does anyone actually know how to model different high-prevalence, high-risk scenarios, and how to then make the trade-off between which ones they focus on? I think it was Adam who said it's having that transparency of, 'These are our proper targets of what we've got to do, and where are we against them?', and evidence that they are being stress tested as well. We can't just have a paper committee and nothing happens.

On module 1, lots of damning things came out about the Welsh Government, but one of the things was how useless their task and finish groups were—that they actually didn't finish anything. A series of them finished absolutely nothing. I think if we're relying on a task and finish type group on this, then we can expect the same outcome. It's for the Welsh Government to change the way they communicate all this with the public and their partners as well, because it's not great at the moment. Data is not great in Wales, as we know.

Tom, very quickly, a very important thing I wanted to add was that, throughout the UK inquiry, what's become a repeated observation is the implementation gap in Wales. There's lots of research, lots of reports, lots of committees and sub-groups, but then nothing happens. I think that's got to change in Wales. There have got to be people who are critical thinkers who are knowledgeable in areas and are able to act decisively and operationalise. But keep iterating, keep checking, like any other—. If you're running a corporation, this is what you do, and this is slightly more important than running a corporation; this is people's lives and livelihoods.

Thank you. And, finally, the one question I did have to ask you but you've kind of touched on anyway, but I'll give you the opportunity in case anything was missed, is on bereavement arrangements. Many families face challenges around not only bereavement arrangements, but sometimes religious services being available during the pandemic and the preparedness around that. So, what do you think could and should be done differently to plan for and support those aspects during these emergencies?

Well, what's interesting is that Wales was the only UK nation that had a national bereavement framework, and that was set up in 2019. However, bizarrely, that was paused during 2020—so, you know, a massive, massive omission there. We have lobbied very hard to get bereavement leads in each health board, and they're now fully funded, but we still find out that they're not very well supported, which is a big concern of ours. We understand there's a trade-off in what you need to focus on, but, again, funerals, faith, bereavement support, they are massively important, and the UK inquiry is focused very much on structures, processes, organisational systems. There's more than that. And I'm calling these 'softer measures', and they shouldn't be, because they're just as vital, if not more vital, than the other things.

And this is also where we felt there was an opportunity within a Wales inquiry to cover some of these areas that have been overlooked by the UK inquiry. So, we absolutely think it's vitally important that, for the next one, we are able to understand—. We understand that funerals, because there was a lack of knowledge about, or the Government said there was a lack of knowledge about what the virus was—. But it was very much a postcode lottery. So, in west Wales, only 10 people could go, and somewhere else it was 20 people could go to a funeral. The logic's there, but, again, it's in the actual implementation as well. I don't believe there was anyone overseeing any of this death management or spiritual welfare et cetera, so I think it's very important to have those considered.

Thank you.

Yes. I attended funerals at that time and couldn't attend others at that time, and it's very difficult, and, of course, those issues feed into things that all the politicians here talk about all the time, like well-being, loneliness, mental health, isolation, suicide, all of which are linked to bereavement, and that was accentuated in the circumstances applying, but that's me making a personal observation, rather than—

Not at all, and I think a COVID bereavement is very different than a normal bereavement, you know, particularly when you haven't seen your loved ones for a while, and then they die and then you can't see—. You can't do anything. It's a very—. And the circumstances are usually that they've gone into hospital for one thing, and then die. You know, it is—. I think there's a lot of hidden grief and guilt. A lot of people in our group have said how guilty they are. They still feel guilty that they didn't do enough.

Yes, I feel incredibly guilty that I didn't do enough. It keeps me awake, and that's five years on in January. But it's not just people who died from COVID as well; Wales should want to look at everybody who was affected during that time—suicide, loneliness, mental health. And also, my dad was diagnosed with cancer in April 2020, just as lockdowns came in. It was written on his notes, but he wasn't told. He wasn't told that he had prostate cancer, and his appointment and treatment was just delayed for six months. That's something that will have affected a lot of people, and that's something that—. You know, people in Wales should have the right to have their voice heard.

The lovely lady, O'Shea, who recently passed, she was impacted by this during COVID as well, and this is—. You know, taking us out of the equation, there are so many people in Wales who haven't had their voice heard. We've been the only people banging on for Wales in London at the inquiry. And there are so many people who haven't had their voice heard, and I think this is where the frustrations come from about not being listened to. I genuinely think it is.

Well, that takes us nicely into, amongst other things, public messaging, and Mike Hedges has some questions.

Yes, I've got some questions. Can I start off with a statement? My father-in-law had COVID during the pandemic, when he couldn't be visited, and he subsequently died of pneumonia. The effect of COVID on him having pneumonia was not on the medical certificate. So, I think that many of us have been affected by COVID. We don't live outside the world that everybody is in.

But what I would ask are some questions on public messaging. During the pandemic, did you find information was unclear? We used the terms COVID-19, COVID, SARS, coronavirus, and earlier on I was checking whether anything else had been added to the mix of names it was given, but all these different names—. Do you think that the messaging—

No.

No, most people completely understood. I know you asked Public Health Wales the same question. Obviously, that's for them or the comms team. I think most people are really clear that what it was called—. It was initially called SARS-2, SARS-COV-2, and then it was called COVID. The virus is the coronavirus, COVID is the disease, so I think most people were pretty clear on that. But, if you want to talk about comms, we can wax lyrical on some of the Welsh Government comms and how confusing those were.

I'm going to ask you that now.

Okay.

All I can say is your experience of people understanding that, and my experience from constituents is different, and I will just leave it at that.

How do you think it affected them by not knowing the difference?

Well, I think it's for—. Questions should be the other way round, but I'm quite happy to answer that. It's because—

We just want to understand the context of your question.

Because people said, 'It's a different disease. I've been told about COVID, now I'm being told about SARS, and now I'm being told about something else. How do they relate? What does it mean?' and—

I think this is a total—

Can I just—? You asked your question—can I just finish? 'If you don't know what it is, how do you expect us to?'

Well, I think everybody—

I would go to your First Minister and health Minister for that question.

Yes. I think everybody knew what it was. We've had people in our group with special needs who know what it was and have had no confusion at all, people with mental disabilities haven't been confused by the messaging at all, so I'm sorry to hear that some of your constituents have.

Can I just interject and just, basically, place on the record that, in those early months in 2020, I was asked to meet online with self-advocacy groups for adults with learning disabilities, part of the voice network across north Wales, and the concern Mike's raised was their concern? They wanted to comply with the rules, but they were not being presented to them in a way that they understood the language being used.

Well, I think—

Well, that's slightly different.

Yes. I think from—. Well, Welsh Government didn't even discuss it in their own Cabinet until the middle of March, so I would be a little bit like—. Let's take the middle of March as the date that the public became aware of it, because—. I don't know. I think it's an irrelevant question for us, to be honest, as bereaved families.

Yes. I mean, we weren't in charge. It's a happy accident that we both work in comms, but we were not responsible for them. I'm sure there's been a lot of evaluation on how the messaging could have been clearer—what was the virus, what was the illness. For example, Mike, what was very difficult was the Welsh Government kept insisting there were only two symptoms to COVID, when, in fact, there were about 10. So, of course, people didn't go and test, because it was only a dry cough, a temperature, and, eventually, a loss of smell and taste. But there were many, many other symptoms that weren't communicated. So, communication, we could probably do a whole three hours on communication.

Can I ask you about where you thought that communication was unclear?

Oh, pretty much all the time. Let's start with the mode of transmission of the virus. So, right from the beginning, it was clear that the coronavirus was aerosol transmitted, and yet everybody denied that it was aerosol. They insisted it was droplets, so had us all washing our hands and mopping down our shopping. That does not protect you from COVID. It is the biggest public health disaster ever, and they had the wrong mode of transmission. We did not protect. We should have had masks, ventilation and isolation.

Communication—Mark Drakeford misled everybody in the Senedd as well.

He said there was no value to testing those without symptoms. He said there was no—. And we have absolute proof that he knew at that time that COVID was transmitted asymptomatically. So, another thing—we had Frank Atherton, then chief medical officer, saying that there was no value to masks. Wales did not bring in mandatory masking, community masking, until September 2020, four months after everyone else. Now, we might have different views on masking, but, again, another 'we do things differently in Wales' that was incredibly confusing. But the comms only really are the tip of the iceberg, because it's the policies that were the problem—you've got different nations with different policies and different ways of communicating them. We were talking earlier, weren't we? 'Test, trace and isolate' everywhere else in the UK; 'Test, trace and protect' in Wales. 'Isolate' is actionable—'test, trace, isolate' is actionable. 'Protect'—no-one knew what that meant. So, it was a real failing of communication. That's a very Welsh example of a failure in communicating something that was so vitally important.

I was just going to say that we know other diseases, people have them asymptomatically, including typhoid, which—

Yes, there are loads of asymptomatically transmitted—. Oh, hang on a minute, are you talking about asymptomatic disease or asymptomatically transmitted?

Asymptomatic disease. People have typhoid, but it doesn't give them any symptoms, so they can still pass it on.

That's asymptomatically transmitted, yes. Because there are two separate things.

Yes, but the people are asymptomatic themselves; they don't show any symptoms of it. Anyway—

There are lots. We can name you a number of viruses that are asymptomatically transmitted.

I was just thinking of one.

The last question from me. We've seen this. We can't do anything about what happened five years ago; we can do things about what may happen in the future. What approach should be taken in future emergencies to ensure that public messaging remains clear and consistent when cross-border policy is different?

Well, they shouldn't differ. That's the whole point. That's the whole point of the inquiry, is saying, 'Do not have different policies.' Therefore, you don't need different communications. That's kind of fundamental. But when you do have communications—I mean, that's really for your Government to agree to, but—be transparent. Don't weaponise the science for your own objectives. Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gething frequently did that: 'We're following the science; we're basing it on the science', when they actually weren't. That's very, very confusing for people, because they all think the science is something tangible and static, which, of course, it isn't.

Yes. You know, your own Government gave up on testing completely, because they didn't have the capacity, but they continued to say, 'Oh, we've got the capacity, we just tailor it—.' They didn't have the capacity. So, I think that's—. You were, your party was in Government at the time—that's a question for them, not bereaved families.

Okay. Thank you very much. But—

Mike wasn't in the Government, I have to say.

No, well, your party was in Government.

I'm being held responsible for what the Government did.

Can I bring Tom in too?

Can I just finish this last point? I think it's very important that we don't have variation, but how would you have dealt with the Irish situation, where you've got two different countries having open borders?

Mike, we're bereaved families. A Northern Ireland-Ireland situation is beyond the scope of our expertise, or—

Okay. I won't take it any further.

I only wanted to come in because I think a lot of the discussion, both here and nationally, where we've had the discussion, has been about the difference in communication, the difference in rules between England and Wales. But I just wanted to ask you one question specifically on the changing rules within Wales, where we had localised lockdowns, local firebreaks, sometimes these hyperlocal kind of lockdowns. I wonder what assessment you made of the effectiveness not only of the policy, but of the communications around that, because we've talked before, haven't we, about how Wales perhaps has a relatively weak media landscape to get messages out, but that is even weaker on a kind of hyperlocal level, so I wondered what you made of that.

Listen, we have the advantage of seeing what messages have been released to the inquiry from Welsh Government. We're at the distinct advantage of knowing what internal comms was happening then, and you don't, which is bonkers, that we're in this position. A lot of it was special adviser driven, a lot of the comms, and a lot of it was made politically and not necessarily with Welsh people in mind. This is what all needs to come out. We've got our hands tied here in what we can say. Welsh Government know what happened, and that's probably one of the reasons why they don't want a Wales COVID inquiry, because they don't want their internal workings and their comms on this matter, and what drove them to make the decisions regarding local lockdowns or whatever—. They probably don't want that reasoning to come out, and why projects were dropped during COVID and dismissed, potential projects, and things like this. It's difficult for us to answer, but I'll hand over to Anna.

I'll use an example of wave 2, pre wave 2. I think what was so confusing was that there were so many different ways of communicating the same thing. But also—again, a recommendation for the future—there needs to be some behavioural analysis as well of styles of communication and content of communication. Because, with wave 2, you got a lockdown, a firebreak, which was earlier and shorter than the England one, preceded by local lockdowns, and then, out of the blue, even when you've got the alpha variant raging through UK, it hits Wales as it comes out of firebreak, but everything opens. That was very confusing to people, because they thought the firebreak had worked, because that was what was communicated, but in fact it was the opposite. It had delayed it, and that was all it was ever designed to do: delay it. But then everything opened: hospitality, events, schools. Everything opened on 9 November 2020.

Everything we're interested in is about the policies of what happened and the decisions. The comms side of it is for a comms team to work out, that they learn from their mistakes.

But if you could also then correlate what those messages were with behaviours and deaths.

Yes, I guess the premise of my question—. Sorry, I know I'm—

I think that's where you're going, isn't it?

I guess the premise of my question is: would a local person—? So, in my region I've got Pontarddulais, which is right on the border between Swansea and Carmarthenshire, and it would have had different rules at different points. People are crossing the bridge there to go to the pub and all the rest of it. A policy is only as good as whether people comply with it. And therefore, would someone in Swansea understand that the behaviour rules are slightly different in Carmarthenshire, or 'There's a lockdown there and there's not here'?

Of course not. Because we don't work like that, do we? The policy maker or the comms team go, 'Well, that's the comms for Carmarthenshire and that's the one for Monmouthshire', but real life doesn't work like that.

And all of these questions that you have are there in the evidence. Well, some of it will give you hints. If you had access to the messages, the limited messages, that have been disclosed, they would answer a lot of your questions. We can't share what it is because we're under oath—. What are we under? We're under something not to say.

Confidentiality agreements.

That's it. For your questions and the rest of Wales with all these questions, this is the sort of evidence that needs to be out there.

But I think, to sum it up, you want clear, one-size-fits-all communications that are backed with proper facts and evidence, not anyone's interpretation of it, because you can't have 10 different versions of the science. There was a particularly good behavioural scientist, I think it was in module 2, who spoke very well on the importance of consistent and clear messaging.

Can I just say that Welsh Government clearly haven't learnt on this, because their messaging over the 20 mph was absolutely appalling? And I agree with the 20 mph, but the messaging and the campaign over that was absolutely diabolical. So, yes, that's a Welsh Government problem, not a bereaved families' problem.

I'd love to get into 20 mph, but I don't think Mark will let me. [Laughter.]

Not in this—

I'm talking about the campaign.

Everybody has views on that. Of course, that cross-border issue was particularly pertinent in areas such as the area where I live, which is very near the Cheshire border, with confusion even rising with the outdoor cinema at Chester football ground, where the toilets were in Flintshire, and they had to put temporary toilets a few yards away on the—

It was bonkers.

It was bonkers, yes. However, I had all the COVID symptoms early in wave 1, pre testing, so I can't say I had it, but it was obvious I did, and three more times, but I was lucky that I didn't end up in hospital, except last new year's eve, when I spent the whole night in hospital after fainting, but there we are. That's just a sideline.

You mentioned in your reply, I think to Mike, that you had evidence of—I think it was a statement by the First Minister. Can you share that with us?

We can certainly send it on to you, yes.

Yes.

Thank you very much.

Yes, I think we put the—they're called INQ numbers, the references from the disclosure in the UK inquiry, but we can send you those.

Okay, thank you. Finally, then, in conclusion, is there anything else that you haven't covered that you would like to share about Wales's approach to resilience and preparedness, the sufficiency thereof and how that might be improved, and what actions should be taken to strengthen preparedness for the future?

It's a combination of transparency and openness and honesty. It's having physical evidence of what the recommendations are, how they are being implemented and to what level, or if they're not, be honest and say, 'That isn't until next autumn.' We very much would recommend the independent panel/commissioner scrutiny element of it, because, no disrespect to this committee, but we've seen in the previous committee that it's very difficult when you've got something in the political domain to be truly independent. No criticism of anyone in the room, but it is just the way it is. And get some experts in, get some experts in preparedness and resilience.

Yes, I think Welsh Government has taken on a very defensive role with this inquiry rather than an open and engaging role. We're five years down the road now, I suspect—

Six.

Yes. I suspect in a year's time the old soldiers will have gone and the tone of the Government will change, and hopefully the new Government will be proud of what Wales is, and actually be proud enough to say when we get it wrong, and that's not a failing. Welsh Government has really failed to do that, and that's the most disappointing. We all fail every day, we fail at stuff all the time, it's fine, there's nothing to be ashamed of, but Welsh Government refuse to acknowledge a single failing, and that is just, for bereaved families, it’s—. I don't get emotional, I get angry—you may have noticed. But for Welsh Government not to acknowledge a single failing is just diabolical, awful.

Module 1, whilst it covers preparedness and resilience, it focuses on structures and systems and processes. What's been very difficult for all of us in the inquiry is that you've then got lots of other modules that will also cover preparedness or lack of. So, you've got the testing module, the PPE module, the healthcare module, the care home module. Now, the big concern for us is that those reports won't come out until the end of next year. That means then there's another year for whoever's in Government to act on them. We want the Welsh Government to start being proactive on this.

Now, it's very interesting that you asked the First Minister a question yesterday about the lack of care home investigations, and she said, 'We've just had the 2B report; the module 6 report will cover it.' Well, it doesn't look into individual investigations at care home level. So, that's confusing, why she would reference that. But what's to stop her or the Welsh Government doing these things of their own volition? Why are they waiting for a generic report that comes out in another two years' time? They did the nosocomial investigation in 2022. There was another motive for that, but it's not beyond them to—. And again, it's about them hanging back when it suits. Be proactive. This is a big deal. Wales is in a mess. Not Wales, but the healthcare system and the social care system are not joined up in any way, and we've got crumbling real estate.

And a complete lack of trust from the Welsh public. That's the big failing, the lack of trust now that we're seeing in the elections, and the polling figures. It's a complete lack of trust. For me, as a stalwart Labour supporter—a member of 30 years—to feel like I could never vote that again says it all.

Okay. On that note, we're going to bring—. I also belatedly welcome Rhianon Passmore who did join us and who's been listening intently. I don't know, Rhianon, if you have anything you wish to add, but no obligation on you to say anything if you don't have anything in mind.

I think that's been put by our witnesses, Chair. Thank you. And you may or may not know that we've had considerable IT problems as well, which have also delayed my contributions. But thank you.

Thank you. Thanks for being with us. We'll bring this session to an end, then. I remind you, as I'm sure you're aware, we will send you a record of today's proceedings for you to check for accuracy before they're published. Otherwise, thank you very much for being with us, and may your journeys home be safe, and may the rest of your day go well.

Thank you very much for listening to us, and please do it for our dads.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

In which case, Members, I propose that in accordance with Standing Order 17.42(ix) the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of today's meeting. Are Members content?

Content.

It seems that Members are content. I therefore would be grateful if we could move into private session.