Mark Drakeford has tried to defend former health minister Vaughan Gething's failure to read a major report into how ready UK was for pandemic before Covid.
Last week Mr Gething, who was health minister throughout the pandemic but is now minister for the economy, appeared before the UK Covid Inquiry. While giving evidence Mr Gething made the embarrassing admission that he had never read the report into Exercise Cygnus.
This was a three-day simulation exercise carried out by the UK Government in October 2016 to estimate the impact of a hypothetical influenza pandemic on the United Kingdom. It found serious shortcomings in how ready we were to deal with this kind of scenario.
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During First Minister's Questions in the Senedd on July 11 Mr Drakeford was asked by Tory leader Andrew RT Davies: "Why would a minister who’s responsible for the health portfolio not read his papers, and make sure that he was making the best-informed decisions to make sure that Wales was protected and have the best measures in place should we be hit by a pandemic?
To this First Minister of Wales Mark Drakeford tried to defend his beleaguered colleague. He said: "Ministers, when they become responsible for a new portfolio, receive an enormous amount of information from their civil servants. It summarises a huge amount of what they will need to know.
"It indicates to them where they will need to do further and more in-depth reading, and ministers follow that advice. Any suggestion that a minister could embark upon a back-catalogue of documents produced over a period of 15 years, and at the same time discharge their everyday responsibilities, it simply does not reflect the way in which Government is conducted in Wales or in any other part of the United Kingdom."
The issues with Mark Drakeford's response
You would expect Mr Drakeford to attempt to stand up for Mr Gething. However there are some serious holes in his defence.
The first is the suggestion that the report had already been published when Mr Gething took on the role of health minister. This simply isn't true.
Operation Cygnus took place from October 18-20, 2016 and the final report which includes the section put to him at the inquiry is dated July 2017. This means Mr Gething will have been in place well over a year when the report was put on his desk.
It is important to also point out that this is not some obscure and nebulous piece of work that is easy to overlook. Time and again a pandemic was cited as one of the key health threats facing Wales and the wider UK. Plus, Mr Gething himself has admitted taking part in Operation Cygnus.
He told the inquiry: "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.
"It involved a range of people, I remember having the briefing with Dr Atherton and I remember sitting down in the basin of Cathays Park control centre where it was run from and participating in those meetings."
Vaughan Gething has already admitted that if he had read the report he would have acted differently. When presented with a part of the report that said "the UK's preparedness and response in terms of its plans, policies, and capability is currently not sufficient to cope with the extreme demands of a severe pandemic" Mr Gething told the inquiry: "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."
