Vaughan Gething’s impending nightmare and why child poverty in Wales will never be fixed

We don't even measure child poverty correctly, how can we hope to abolish it?

Hello!

This is the first of two scheduled newsletters as I am away on leave. If something crazy has happened in the last seven days please forgive the omission.

In this email I am going to break down the huge obstacle facing Vaughan Gething as he tries to become Welsh Labour leader and First Minister (spoiler, it is his previous actions) and then will look into why Wales’ child poverty problem is not likely to be solved any time soon.

Vaughan Gething did not have a good pandemic

Though Mr Gething is basing a lot of his leadership campaign around the idea that he was at the sharp end during Covid and is therefore experienced, he had a poor pandemic. Not the most important thing but probably the most memorable was the fact he never managed to master Zoom. 

Twice he failed to turn his mic off and was heard laying into fellow Labour members.

The first was when he was heard swearing about Jenny Rathbone (a response I suspect some of her colleagues and constituents can sympathise with):

The second was when he said that Aberavon Senedd member David Rees had asked a “ridiculous question”: 

Vaughan Gething’s upcoming nightmare

From February 27 until March 14 the UK Covid Inquiry is going to be based in Wales. They will be hearing evidence about how the Welsh Government handled the pandemic. While it won’t be able to devote nearly the amount of attention to the issue as a Welsh specific inquiry would, because of Mark Drakeford’s continued refusal to hold one, this is all we have. 

Having seen Drakeford and Vaughan Gething’s (who was health minister through the pandemic) performance at the inquiry last year I can see why Welsh Labour are desperate to not have a Welsh inquiry. Gething’s performance in particular was a car crash. 

He admitted that he never read the conclusions of a key report into pandemic preparedness which he himself took part in. 

Under questioning from the committee's barristers in July last year, Mr Gething was asked if he "had any direct involvement in Exercise Cygnus in October 2016." To this Mr Gething said: 

"Yes, I attended ministerial meetings on both days as requested. My deputy at the time also attended some of those exercises as requested. So on both of the days when ministerial attendance was requested we both participated.”

He was then shown the conclusions of the report which concluded that Wales was not ready for a pandemic. 

The inquiry questioner then asked: "Do you remember reading that in October of 2016?" to which the former health minister said "No". She then asked "Had you read it, would that have caused you some concern?"

Mr Gething then replied: "If I had read that, I think that I almost certainly would have asked more questions and asked for more assurance about what was happening."

The barrister then asked: "Can we take it that you didn't read the report?" to which Mr Gething said: "No, I didn't. I didn't, I did not read this report. I recognise the front now.”

But now the Covid inquiry has published its 'Provisional Outline of Scope' for the next round of questioning and I think there are few issues here which could be really serious for Mr Gething and risk derailing his leadership bid. This first is:

“The Welsh Government’s initial understanding of, and response to, the nature and spread of Covid-19 in Wales in the period between January and March 2020 in light of information and advice received from the UK Government and other relevant international and national bodies, advice from scientific, medical and other advisers and the response of other countries.”

So in a nutshell this is “how did the Welsh Government handle the pandemic before we went into the first lockdown?” This is going to be really tricky for Mr Gething. Despite health being devolved the Welsh Government didn’t really grasp the nettle that they were responsible for Wales’ Covid response until we had already locked down. They simply deferred to Westminster. The times they had to make calls - they didn’t. 

The Stereophonics concerts went ahead over the weekend of March 14 and 15, not to mention the scheduled Six Nations game between Wales and Scotland in Cardiff.

It was obvious to everyone that this needed to be cancelled. Two other Six Nations games had already been pulled as was the forthcoming football match between Wales and the USA and the Premier League was already on hold until at least April.

Despite this Mr Gething said: “There is little medical reason at the moment to ban such events.” He even told journalists he'd take his own family to the Six Nations fixture against Scotland. Juxtaposed to the fact he never even read the report on our pandemic preparedness this will not be a good look.

The second big headache Mr Gething will have comes from the section of the inquiry looking at:  

Access to and use in decision-making of medical and scientific expertise, data collection and modelling relating to the spread of the virus in Wales

This is going to expose how the Welsh Government utterly failed in the first wave of Covid when it came to care homes. Vaughan Gething decided to not test asymptomatic patients going into care homes for weeks after England brought in the policy. The fact that it was not until April 29 that Vaughan Gething changed the policy to allow all residents coming into homes to be tested will surely be raised. Until that point, only those with symptoms were allowed to have a test. Even jungle man Matt Hancock took a break from grabbing ass to announce on April 14 that everyone going into care homes could be tested.

Experts on the Sage committee knew the risks of transmission from non-diagnosed Covid-19 positive patients and staff long before this- and yet nothing was done to stop elderly patients flooding out of virus-ridden hospitals into care homes without a test.

Wales lost 3.4% of all its 23,000 care home residents in the first wave of the virus and you can bet that the inquiry will want to look at how this was handled.

“The impact of any alleged breaches of rules and standards by Ministers, officials and advisers”

IMO it’s not the biggest issue of Vaughan Gething’s handling of the pandemic but given the inquiry will look at “alleged rule breaches” he will likely face questions about when he was pictured sat eating chips outside at a time when we were only supposed to be outside to exercise for 15 minutes.

Why Wales’ poverty problem isn’t going to be fixed

Last week the Welsh Government published a document which it says lays out its strategy to tackle child poverty in Wales. The 38-page document was actually due to be published at the end of last year.

We have spoken about child poverty a lot in previous newsletters. Suffice to say, it is an enormous problem. The Welsh Gov’s plan lists five objectives and 19 things they say it will do to try and achieve those objectives. However this is worth, IMO, f’all because the “plan” contained no specific funding, targets or way of monitoring success.

A group of charities issued a joint statement criticising the document. They included the Children’s Commissioner for Wales along with, Children in Wales, Action for Children, The Trussell Trust, Citizens Advice, Barnardo’s Cymru, Home Start Cymru, Save the Children, Oxfam Cymru, The Children’s Society, NSPCC Wales, NYAS Cymru, University of Wales Trinity Saint David and Child Poverty action group.

They said:

“We’ve been promised a monitoring framework, but we’ve not been given any indication of when this will be in operation or what it will include. Until then, we will not be able to determine whether public money being spent in Wales is reaching those children, whose lives are being so severely affected.”

The Welsh Government has failed miserably at tackling child poverty in Wales but to be fair to them, the big levers of actually tackling it don’t really lay with them - they lay in Westminster. And if you think that the UK Government is going to truly tackle this issue you have another thing coming.

I don’t say this flippantly. I feel absolutely confident in saying that they don’t intend to tackle it because they don’t really even measure it. Watch this video from 2022:

Rishi Sunak argues that poverty has fallen because of the actions of the Conservatives over the last decade. Can this be true given the prevailing narrative of recent years is that more and more people are struggling financially? The very short answer is yes, he technically is correct, but only with a very particular reading of the data.

If you look at it based on the lived realities of the people in the UK, he has drastically misled the public on the situation. To understand how Rishi Sunak is able to make these claims we need to understand the definition of poverty he is using.

In a UK context there are two definitions that tend to be used - "Absolute Poverty" and "Relative Poverty" (though there are many other ways to do it). 

This is what they mean in practice:

Absolute poverty - This is where a household’s income is less than 60% of the median (average) as it stood in 2011. 

This means that it is a fixed figure and this causes a few issues.

For example, if you were just below the poverty line in 2012 but get a small pay rise the following year you are now "out of poverty" by this definition. 

But if your bills have tripled over the same period you're actually worse off (despite now officially being out of poverty).

It also means that as wages rise over time fewer people will be "in poverty" but the reality of their lives is that they have less income because the cost of everything has gone up faster.

Relative poverty (RP) - This is defined as below 60% of average incomes in any given year (whereas absolute poverty is fixed in 2010/11).

RP is able to measure whether people on lower incomes are catching up with those on higher incomes, and whether they are benefiting from overall economic growth. 

RP is the method charities use because it is a far better reflection of the lived realities of people's lives.

The graph below shows both relative poverty (yellow) and absolute poverty (blue). As you can see absolute poverty has fallen a great deal since the 1990s (but this is understandable as it is being compared with incomes from 2010).

But if we look at the yellow line we can see that relative poverty (the version that actually applies to people's lives) has been stubbornly unmoved since the Tories came into power in 2010.

If you are not measuring the problem properly you are clearly not serious about tackling it. What you can measure you can manage, and if you don’t measure, how can you properly manage?

That is all from me this week. Thanks so much again for reading and please do spread the word about this newsletter. 

Take care,

Will