As the older people's commissioner rightly states:

'Holding a Wales-specific Public Inquiry will ensure that the Chair and the panel running the Inquiry understand devolution and the cultural and political distinctiveness of Wales, as well as being representative of the diversity of our nation and accessible in a way that a UK-wide Inquiry may not be able to achieve.'

That is why we must reject the Welsh Government's amendment to this debate and reject their stance on this issue. This Welsh Government took decisions that led us down a different path to England and resulted in one of the highest COVID death rates in the world. We had a Government led by a First Minister who refused for months to accept the evidence on face masks, despite evidence showing their effectiveness in combating the spread of SARS and MERS. The First Minister refused to introduce their use in Wales, and, when questioned, the First Minister said, 'They aren't at the bottom of my list, they aren't even on my list.' How many lives were lost as a result of the First Minister's reluctance to heed the evidence? 

The SARS-CoV-2 virus was allowed to spread largely unchecked, leading to larger numbers of cases needing hospital treatment, which in turn put pressure on health chiefs to move patients out of the NHS and into care homes. This is when the Welsh Government's biggest and most serious error of judgment came into play, by failing to test and quarantine patients before moving them into care homes. The Welsh Government allowed COVID-19 to spread unchecked into the care sector. How many care home sector residents and staff died as a result of this Government's failings? Their failings put our most vulnerable citizens at risk and no doubt contributed to the deaths of so many. Field hospitals were set up across the country and, rather than being used to keep vulnerable patients safe from the virus, they went largely unused.

Patients with COVID were allowed to mix with vulnerable patients, allowing infections to spread relatively unchecked. One in four Welsh citizens who succumbed to the pandemic died of a COVID infection picked up in Welsh hospitals. The Welsh Government were responsible for decisions that led to this calamity, yet they are not prepared to accept the consequences of their decisions. Instead, they choose to hide behind a UK-wide inquiry, rather than facing an independent Wales-only inquiry—an inquiry that can only focus full-time upon the decisions taken by Welsh Ministers, upon actions that impacted Welsh citizens and upon learning Wales-focused lessons to ensure Wales is never again put at risk like it was during the early phases of this pandemic.

Welsh Ministers took decisions that directly impacted the lives of every citizen in Wales, decisions that we will be paying for for generations, yet they are not prepared to defend those decisions to the people of Wales. Yes, a UK-wide public inquiry will have a Welsh dimension, but it'll be little more than a footnote. The UK inquiry will be largely focused on the English NHS. And, after all, the population of England equates to three quarters of the UK population. The English NHS serves nearly 20 times more people than ours. The only way the people of Wales will get the answers they need and deserve is by holding an independent public inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic in Wales, and I urge Members to listen to their consciences tonight and I plead for you to reject the Welsh Government's attempts to avoid scrutiny and I beg you to listen to the bereaved families across Wales. Vote for our motion today and let's hold a Welsh public inquiry.