Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:52 pm on 3 May 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:52, 3 May 2022

Well, Llywydd, the Member could not be more mistaken. He answered his own question in his very first set of remarks: an independent inquiry focused only on Wales would never be able to make sense of exactly the sorts of decisions to which he has pointed. Had he been actually following what the High Court said, he would have seen that the High Court referred to the advice that was available to the UK Government, which was the same advice available to the Government here in Wales. You cannot understand the decisions that were made in Wales by divorcing those decisions from the UK context, the UK advice, the UK level of understanding at the time, and the way in which that was available here in Wales. That's why I have always argued that the best way in which people can get answers to the questions that they absolutely rightly want to see explored, and the Welsh Government will take part in the independent inquiry led by Judge Hallett in the most open way that we can. We will provide all the documents that we have; we will provide all the evidence that was available to us, and we will do so in a way that is not designed to defend the position that the Welsh Government took on any issue. I've already instructed those people who are helping to prepare the Welsh Government's evidence that the approach I want us to take is one in which we will explain why we took the decisions that we did and then leave it for the inquiry to decide whether those decisions were defensible. I am not going to go into an inquiry seeking to justify or defend—those were terms that the Member used; they're not the terms that I will use. We will go there to explain and we will provide all the evidence we can as to why we came to the decisions that we did, and it's then for the inquiry, not for the Welsh Government, and if I can say so, not for the leader of the opposition either, to decide whether or not those decisions were defensible in the context of the time in which they were made.