Why Mark Drakeford is a slippery fish

The Covid Inquiry is getting really embarrassing for the Welsh Gov

Morning all!

Have I got a (potentially depressing) treat for you today.

We have: 

1. The man making Welsh politics a joke

2. The revelations from the Covid Inquiry that are somehow simultaneously shocking and unexpected

3. Why Mark Drakeford is a slippery fish

4. My mission to get Vaughan Gething to answer a question

5. The surprising way that Wales is being subtly shafted by the UK Government

First welcome to all the new subscribers. We are now pushing 1,000 which is nowhere near what I expected when I started this. The fact that so many of you are willing to pay for this genuinely gives me more time to do this kind of journalism - I am so grateful.

I appreciate that I haven’t done any in depth analysis of issues in Wales recently (like when I made all the maps to understand Wales). But it really feels like with the Covid Inquiry and the race to be First Minister there are some huge events happening in Wales at the moment and I believe it is important to document them to breakdown what has happened. Therefore most of this newsletter will be looking at the insane revelations at the Covid inquiry but first let’s make time for a politician telling porkies….

The man making Welsh politics a joke

A very quick one to start off with - a politician lying. 

This is so cut and dry (as well as being embarrassing) I am going to whizz through this to on to something meaningful. So let’s have a whistle stop tour of the Welsh Tory leader Andrew RT Davies deliberately misleading people by spreading misinformation.

Mr Davies tweeted this:

Needless to say, this is rubbish. It did not cost £233k to ban GB News. It cost nothing.

Back in November the presiding officer of the Senedd Elin Jones banned GB News because of comments made by Laurence Fox about a female journalist. If you remember the Harrow-educated Mr Fox said: "Who would want to s**g that?". Ms Jones said that this is "how women can be spoken of on social media" and "don't expect me to tolerate it". From this time, GB News has been blocked on the screens around the Welsh Parliament.

So where has Andrew RT Davies got his inaccurate figures from? The £233,000 figure relates to a multi-year programme in the Senedd to update all TVs and digital signage in public areas to improve visitor experience. At the same time, the same platform was used replace the Senedd’s internal television systems that feed all screens across the estate with Plenary, committee and some free-to-air channels.

The old system had been in place since 2005 and was failing. Approval was given to the replacement in February 2020 - almost four years before the GB News ban (and actually before the channel even existed). 

Mr Davies knows what he is saying isn’t true. I know this because he asked a question about it a few weeks ago. It is all available on the Senedd website. It even breaks down what the money was spent on.

This is the stage we have now got to. The leader of the opposition, who should be presenting himself as a serious and credible alternative, is spouting misinformation at a rate that would make a Russian bot proud. It is embarrassing and Wales deserves better.

The incredible truths we have learned as the Covid Inquiry comes to Cardiff

Unless you are a loser like me you probably haven’t followed every minute of the Covid Inquiry in Cardiff. Having written a book on the first wave of the virus in Wales I like to think that I am pretty well versed on what happened. 

Yet I was watching the interviews with Chief Medical Officer Frank Atherton and former head of NHS Dr Andrew Goodall with my mouth wide open. Seriously, for periods my mouth was so wide from shock that I was like a basking shark just floating through the ocean of their testimony. Their abject performance was the plankton drifting through my gill nourishing my live blog and confirming every worst suspicion we all had about the Welsh Covid response. 

I know that this analogy is a bit niche and nerdy but let’s face it, you are subscribing to a Welsh politics newsletter, you were never the cool kid in school.

Let me give you the key points from the inquiry this week:

The Welsh Government sat on their hand even after being warned about the virus in January 2020

It is hard to express how weak the testimony of former head of Welsh NHS in Wales, Dr Andrew Goodall was. This should be concerning because he is now the head of Welsh civil service. 

He was twice pulled up by the chair of the Inquiry Baroness Hallett for implying that they had done work when they had actually just sat and waited. You can see it in these two videos here:

The first video relates to the fact on January 21, 2020, the chief medical officer Sir Frank Atherton gave him and other NHS leaders an update on Covid saying they needed "think about their plans for isolation and ambulances....if it comes to the UK".

He was then asked if he did this. Mr Goodall said "work was initiated" but the chair did not accept this.

While we are on the subject of Mr Goodall, it is worth noting that he is a great example of how Welsh politics is a very small world and how there are often accusations of a bizarre and opaque recruitment processes.

Dr Goodall was working as the chief executive for Aneurin Bevan Health Board but was seconded to be Director General of Health and Social Services and Chief Executive NHS in 2014. He was then seconded to be the new permanent secretary in 2021. Despite now being Wales' top civil servant, he still is technically seconded from Aneurin Bevan Health Board.

Last year a Senedd committee said that they found some of the arrangements around his appointment "confusing and unclear". One of these issues was the fact Dr Goodall kept his £200,000-£205,000 a year salary for this role despite the fact that "the salary payable to the former permanent secretary was, at this point, in the band £155,000-£160,000". The committee suggested that the fact the job was advertised for possibly £50,000 less than Mr Goodall was paid on recruitment may have meant the calibre of candidates was lower than it could have been if had been advertised at the higher rate.

The Welsh Government didn’t just fail to protect care home residents, they literally allowed the virus to enter care settings because they thought homes “should be able to manage the infection” 

The testimony from Frank Atherton was revealing. He was shown emails he was sent expressing concern at this and how families would feel if there were Covid outbreaks in care homes.

Dr Atherton said it was "not an easy decision" to discharge people back into care homes without coronavirus tests, but there was an understanding that care homes should be able to manage infections.

Let’s be clear here. This was a “decision”. It wasn’t that the virus circumvented a ring of protection that we put around care homes knowing that the people there were the most at risk in society. Instead people were discharged into these settings and not tested. 

Why weren’t they tested? Well this guidance that was also shared in the inquiry shows why. Take a look at the part between the expertly drawn red brackets. 

“All patients” with Covid can be “safety cared for in a care home if this guidance is followed”.

What madness is this? These care homes had little PPE, no Covid tests and staff who were sick themselves and who were often changing daily based on what an agency could provide. Yet they were expected to manage a virus we had never heard of before which even hospitals were struggling to contain. We left the weakest in our society utterly exposed. Which brings me to the next point….

Vaughan Gething was deeply misleading during the pandemic regarding care homes

During the pandemic, I attended the vast majority of the Welsh Government press conferences and was also part of the Westminster press lobby. At the time it was assumed the reason that the Welsh Government was not making sure that every discharge into a care home was tested for Covid was because there weren't enough tests. 

But according to then health minister Vaughan Gething this was not the case. When I questioned him during Covid press conferences in early 2020 he replied furiously “you are wrong” and was adamant testing had nothing to do with the decision. He went as far as saying that even with "treble the amount of testing capacity”, he still would not have allowed testing of people without symptoms in care homes. He said that the reasons for the delay was basing decisions on advice and evidence. The advice and the evidence changes.”

But this was seemingly contradicted by Chief Scientific Officer Rob Orford while giving evidence. He confirmed in the Inquiry that there had been no advice from himself or the group advising the Welsh Gov, underpinning the guidance on April 9, 2020 that negative tests were not required when discharging patients from hospital into care homes.

The lead counsel for the Welsh module of the inquiry asked Mr Orford about why Wales took two weeks longer than England to test people going into care homes and asked if there were more tests available, would the policy to test people before discharge have started sooner? Dr Orford said: "Hypothetically would we start at the position we ended at? I mean, logically, I would say yes."

Dr Orford explained there was also a need to bring testing to care homes in general, not just for those on discharge from hospital. This seemingly directly contradicts what Vaughan Gething said at the time.

Why Mark Drakeford is a very slippery fish

Firstly, YES I am aware that this is my second fish analogy in this newsletter and YES I also had to check that a whale shark was a fish and not a whale. 

Given all the revelations in the inquiry, such as the fact that Mark Drakeford’s WhatsApps were deleted, it is only natural that the public and politicians would want some answers from the First Minister. 

Luckily the Welsh parliamentary system provides the perfect setting for just such an occasion - First Minister’s Questions (FMQs). This is a time when the democratically elected government of Wales has to stand up and take questions from the democratically elected parliamentarians of Wales. Unfortunately for everyone who values an open and transparent Government, Mr Drakeford refused to play ball. 

Any questions related to Covid he totally refused to answer because it would “disrespect the inquiry”. There is something almost impressive about using an inquiry designed to increase scrutiny and transparency to dodge a question. 

You can see an example of it here:

The idea that Mark Drakeford can’t answer any questions about the pandemic (which constituted a huge proportion of his tenure in the role) because someone else may ask him a similar question one day, is madness. 

One of the worst sides of Welsh Labour is this inability to front up when facing legitimate questions. It is the ultimate disrespect for the Welsh democracy they like to claim credit for creating. 

My mission to get Vaughan Gething to answer a question

Last week I documented my big investigation into the donations to First Minister hopeful Vaughan Gething’s leadership campaign. This included me trying and failing to get him, his team, or any of his supporters to explain why he took a donation from a company who were planning to build a huge solar farm in his constituency (you can read it here).

I want to just briefly update you on where I am at with this. Following the last newsletter I approached Vaughan Gething and requested a sit down interview. 

The request was rejected because Mr Gething was “preparing for his Covid Inquiry appearance”. Hmmm OK.

While given his last appearance no one can deny he does need to prepare more, this does seem like he is hiding from scrutiny (there seems to be a trend of people aspiring to be First Minister doing this). I therefore asked if I could send a list of questions to him and they said yes. I am yet to get a response but will share them in the next newsletter when/if I do. 

The unbelievable way that Wales is being subtly shafted by the UK Government

OK this one is a bit random but I want to draw your attention to the work of the academic Dr Robert Jones who is a lecturer in the Welsh criminal justice system at Cardiff Uni. 

This is fiddly but stay with me because it shows just how dysfunctional the current system of devolution is. 

Basically, prisons are not devolved so are run by the UK Gov. But healthcare in prisons is devolved so that is run by the Welsh NHS. 

Back in 2004/05 Wales used to get £2.544m a year to support health care in public sector prisons in Wales. But this has not changed in the nearly 20 years since then. So there has been no increase to account for inflation or the fact the prison population is bigger.

This means there is now more than a £3m deficit. You can see the break down in this table:

So Wales is losing £3m a year from this not being updated, and if not corrected it will cost £30m over the next decade. 

Health boards do not get specific cash if they have a prison in their area. This is a challenge because we know that prisoners are more likely to have mental and physical health problems as well as issues like addition. Plus they are less likely to be registered with a GP. 

It is basically like placing a really unhealthy small town in the middle of the Valleys and then making Cwm Taf health board find the money to take care of the people there. The money will need to come from other pots. 

I am trying to get more information on this as well as responses from the UK Government but the Welsh Gov have confirmed that they recognise these figures. This just shows how hodgepodge the current system of funding for Wales is.

At no point has anyone really tried to answer they question “what does Wales need and how do we resource it”. It is simply “what does England need and what does that mean Wales gets”.  I will cover this is more detail in a later newsletter (in the meantime I do recommend Dr Jones’ book on the criminal justice system in Wales).

Well that is all from me. As always, give me your thoughts, comments, ideas and suggestions for future newsletters.

Take care

Will “the basking shark” Hayward