I remember in March 2020 sitting in the leader's office at Flintshire County Council, working out how we could send everyone to work from home and keep front-line services running. We were stunned and it was frightening for our workforce. Initially, I spent time collecting PPE of any type from playgroups, schools, businesses and volunteers who had been printing 3D face masks. Flintshire care homes and domiciliary care staff were desperate for any form of PPE. Orders they'd placed for PPE were being unfulfilled, and I was told that Public Health England were diverting all PPE to their collection points and that they would then be distributed to Wales. I contacted Airbus, because I knew a flight of PPE was coming in, and I was then told it was all going to UK Government to then be distributed and we had to wait.

Track and trace in Wales was done through local government, who were the experts, and used to tackling outbreaks of viruses and diseases. It was delivered at a fraction of the cost of England's, which was done through private companies, costing billions, with very poor success levels. I think there was a 90 per cent success rate in Wales through local authorities, whereas in England, it was 65 per cent on average. There was excellent partnership working between the Welsh Government and local authority leaders and chief executives, with weekly engagement.

The UK Treasury wasted £8.7 billion of public money on PPE it couldn't use; almost as much as the entire annual spend of NHS Wales. A further £4.3 billion of money was fraudulently stolen from COVID-19 support schemes and was casually written off. Much of the unsuitable and unusable PPE was supplied by companies that were fast-tracked by Tory MPs and Ministers to obtain contracts for which they were unsuited to deliver, and some of these companies saw profits grow by billions. I'm saying this because this money could have now been used to pay for nurses' wages, for the recruitment of social care workers, to fill the black hole caused by rising energy and inflation costs. [Interruption.] It does matter, because it matters now to what we're able to provide for people that are sick now.

By having a UK-wide inquiry, it will be more rounded. The UK Government will have the powers and resources to be able to mobilise all the necessary information—[Interruption.] I only have three minutes—and powers needed to interrogate it. The Welsh Government is disclosing hundreds of thousands of documents to the inquiry and I want to know why certain cohorts were more impacted: BAME communities, people who lived in deprived areas. My daughter caught COVID when she was 12 weeks pregnant and then developed a heart condition that made her collapse. I wanted to know whether that's because she was pregnant or because of COVID; we still don't know. However, once the UK inquiry report is published, the Senedd should then be able to analyse it and further consideration should be given to setting up a Senedd committee to conduct its own inquiry in those areas that need further scrutiny. Diolch.