'Inexcusable': One-word verdict on Drakeford government as people died

Baroness Heather Hallett condemns Mark Drakeford's Welsh Government for over its handling of Covid as the death rate soared in late 2020. Political editor Ruth Mosalski reports

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MARK Drakeford was a widely-respected leader during Covid who won support and affection from across Wales for the father of the nation approach he adopted throughout the pandemic.

Yet Baroness Heather Hallett's Covid inquiry report published on Thursday gives a damning verdict on his government's actions in the autumn and early winter of 2020 as the second wave of Covid-19 hit Wales.

In a video message summing up her verdict on the Welsh Government's handling of the pandemic, the respected judge praises the former First Minister's leadership style, which she describes positively in comparison to the other governments of the UK for making decisions on the basis of consensus within the full Welsh cabinet.

Yet she condemns as "inexcusable" the failure to learn lessons from the first wave of the pandemic in how Wales approached the second wave.

Wales had the highest death rate in the UK that autumn and winter. Between September 1, 2020, and February 28, there were 185,959 cases and 3,783 deaths involving Covid-19 in Wales. That is more than twice as many deaths as there had been in the first wave of the virus between March 1 and August 31, 2020 (1,594 deaths).

Baroness Hallett is fiercely critical of the Welsh Government's actions in the chaotic months of October, November and December 2020 .

She said the most relevant of her findings to Wales was that governments did "too little, too late" at the start of the pandemic but her words about the second wave as a more transmissible variant of Covid spread across the UK are chilling reading.

She said: "Instead, it pressed on with plans for relaxing measures over Christmas while cases grew rapidly, only to change course on the 19th of December, when levels of infection became critical. The mistakes of February or March 2020 were repeated. A return to lockdown had once again become unavoidable. That was inexcusable," she said.