That is the body that will be able to scrutinise those decisions made by the Welsh Government and other Welsh bodies, which drew on the relationships between decisions made in Wales and Whitehall, the scientific advice that was received, not just in Wales, but at a UK level, the often complex funding streams that shaped the decisions that were made, procurement decisions, guidance decisions, that plethora of issues that crossed the border between Wales and the United Kingdom every single day and which only a UK-wide inquiry will be able to scrutinise, and on which only a UK inquiry will be able to provide answers to the questions that people, including those families, very properly need and deserve to have answered.

And the reason why the UK inquiry is able to have that forensic look at the decisions that were made in Wales is because of the way we worked with the UK Government to make sure that the terms of reference of that inquiry will provide—[Interruption.] No, I’m not taking any interventions. The reason why the UK inquiry is able to do the work in the way that it will be able to do is because of the agreement we made with the UK Government so that, as the Prime Minister of the time, Boris Johnson, said, it would guarantee that the UK inquiry would have a significant Welsh dimension to everything that it did. And I think the way in which the UK inquiry is going about its work already demonstrates that commitment: the way in which it works through the medium of the Welsh as well as the English language; the first place Baroness Hallett visited was to come here to Wales, and she herself has met with members of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group here in Wales.

And the work of that inquiry has already started. We in the Welsh Government are already in receipt of a series of complex requests for information and for statements, all of which we will provide, and we are already in the process of selecting and sharing the relevant material from the nearly 10 million documents that we have identified as in the possession of the Welsh Government alone that relate to the two years of the pandemic. Our responses and statements will help the inquiry to make the enquiries that it is committed to making about the way in which the pandemic was dealt with here in Wales.

Llywydd, let me address today’s motion directly. It suggests that a Senedd committee should consider aspects of the COVID experience in Wales that might not receive sufficient attention by the Hallett inquiry, and let me be clear that, if that concern materialises, then the motion’s central proposal, a special purpose committee, is one that the Government can and will support. What I had hoped to do was to lay an amendment this afternoon that would have allowed the Senedd to focus on how and when it would be possible to identify any unanswered questions or areas of incomplete scrutiny so that the work of a special purpose committee could be focused on that, on those gaps. Now, I’ll think carefully about the points I’ve heard made in today’s debate, Llywydd, but the most straightforward approach would be to receive the Hallett report, then to see if and when and where any gaps have emerged, and then to allow a special purpose committee to discharge the remit suggested, which is to fill in any gaps should the UK inquiry not be able to answer them for Wales.

Now, unfortunately, we’ve not been able to make that way of proceeding debated this afternoon, and, for those reasons, the Government side will have to vote against the current motion. However, we will do so in order to bring forward our own motion for debate in Government time. That motion will accept the case for a special purpose committee on the basis that I have set out this afternoon, and will allow the Senedd to give our proposals its full consideration.