Pandemic planning and preparedness in Wales was “wholly inadequate”, the legal counsel representing bereaved Welsh families told the first public hearing of the UK’s official Covid Inquiry this week. Speaking on behalf of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru, Kirsten Heaven said many of those bereaved people experienced and continue to experience “suffering and trauma” owing to Covid-19 and “feel they were let down by their government”.
“They feel let down because they have experienced first-hand the consequences of what they consider to be the catastrophic failure of the Welsh Government to adequately prepare for, and respond to, a pandemic in Wales,” she told the first public hearing of module one of the Covid Inquiry, which is interrogating the UK’s pandemic planning and preparedness.
Welsh Government responsibility
Heaven said it was the view of the Cymru group that pandemic planning was the responsibility of the devolved Welsh Labour Government rather than Westminster. There will, however, be no separate Welsh inquiry into the pandemic in Wales, or the Welsh Government’s handling of Covid.
As of 7 June 2023, 901,998 Covid-19 cases had been officially recorded in Wales. Up to 12 May 2023, 11,848 deaths had been recorded in Wales with Covid-19 on the death certificate.
“This inquiry is therefore the only opportunity the people of Wales will have to ensure that there is proper scrutiny of the decisions of the Welsh Government and their advisers in the planning and response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Heaven. “The people of Wales are looking for answers.”
She added that the Cymru group had been “shocked” by the “brevity and lack of detail” in statements submitted to the Inquiry by the Welsh Government and officials. Concerns have previously been raised by legal representatives of the Cymru bereaved about the late receipt of documents and evidence required by the Inquiry.
“It also appears very disappointing that in some quarters, there appears to be a reluctance by certain ministers to take political responsibility for failures to prepare for a pandemic in Wales,” she added.
Lack of planning and preparedness
Heaven suggested that the Welsh Government had not learned lessons from formal planning exercises conducted in 2009, 2014, and 2015. Wales did not “formally plan for the impact of lockdown measures” until after Covid had arrived in the UK, or test surge capacity, she said. “These exercises appeared bureaucratic and merely designed to satisfy administrative requirements, rather than address the substance of pandemic planning.”
A lack of planning and preparedness for sufficient body bags and storage, for example, caused “untold suffering in Wales”, she said. “There appears to be no evidence of adequate planning in relation to post-death procedures to protect dignity and to support the worst grief in the event of a pandemic.”
Heaven said one of the Welsh Government’s most significant failures was the fact it only planned for a flu pandemic, “to the exclusion of planning for other viruses with pandemic potential”. “This,” she said, “was a catastrophic and unjustifiable failure.”
Those with “political responsibilities” in Wales did not adequately check the state of pandemic preparedness, or that recommendations from planning exercises had been implemented in intervening years, she added.
Excuses and inadequacies
Heaven suggested that neither Brexit nor “a lack of sufficient funding from the UK government” should be used as an excuse for any inadequacies in the Welsh Government’s pandemic planning and preparedness. Earlier in the first day of the public hearing, Hugo Keith KC, legal counsel to the Inquiry, suggested that planning for a no-deal Brexit from 2018 onwards had hindered the required improvements to resilience planning and preparedness in central government.
If such reasons were given by the Welsh Government, Heaven said, the Inquiry should ask how it had sought to address such funding issues. “Did the Welsh Government consistently ask the UK government for more money after devolution for pandemic planning? The Welsh Government has had 24 years since devolution to plan for such a pandemic in a way that best protected the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in our society.”
Concluding her statement to the Inquiry, Heaven said the Welsh Government must now make a “genuine commitment” to long-term pandemic planning. “In Wales there were many preventable deaths from Covid-19. The Welsh Government must now acknowledge what went wrong so that, when the next pandemic arrives, Welsh lives are better protected.”
This article was originally published on opendemocracy.net and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. Minor insubstantive changes to text, layout, and format have been made to accommodate the Bylines Network style guide and adjust for the passing of time.
