The Welsh government’s former health minister has accused Westminster of ignoring letters and stonewalling meeting requests – and said it hampered the nation’s preparation for a pandemic.

Vaughan Gething, minister for health and social services from 2016 to 2021, told the UK’s official Covid inquiry that Westminster “did not take ministers and officials from the devolved governments seriously”.

Gething said ministers including Matt Hancock had taken months to respond to correspondence, or even failed to respond altogether.

Kate Blackwell KC, counsel to the inquiry, asked the former health minister if “strained ministerial relations [had hampered] pandemic preparedness in Wales”.

Gething responded: “Yes, I do think they had an effect,” adding: “We would request meetings, we wrote on a number of issues… it took a very long time to get a response and that isn’t an accident.”

He blamed the UK government for the lack of cooperation, saying ministers should have been more pragmatic.

“You don’t have to like the person on the other side of the desk, but you should from time to time meet,” he said.

Mark Drakeford, the first minister for Wales, was also asked about relations between UK and Welsh health ministers.

Hugo Keith KC, chief counsel to the inquiry, asked whether “relations between Wales and the Westminster government worked well”.

“No. I wouldn’t characterise them as working well,” said Drakeford. He added that the system was overly reliant on “individual willingness” to engage on behalf of the UK government.

Drakeford was also questioned about additional responsibilities given to the Welsh government in 2018 for managing its own emergency planning.

He complained that “the normal pattern would be that a transfer of functions is accompanied by a transfer of funding” but that in this case “no funding followed from the UK government, so funding had to be found from wider Welsh resources”.

This funding was sought but the Cabinet Office denied the request, saying it could not identify a specific amount it had been spending on this previously.

The Welsh government had to create eight new roles to administer these new responsibilities for planning and risk management.

Stockpiling

Meanwhile, Gething, who is now minister for the economy, was questioned about stockpiles of personal protective equipment (PPE) held in advance of the pandemic that were meant to last 15 weeks.

An Audit Wales report, ‘Procuring and Supplying PPE for the Covid-19 Pandemic’, published in April 2021, highlighted that these stockpiles were exhausted far quicker than this, with supplies of aprons only lasting for six weeks and gloves for a week and a half.

The former health minister admitted that “our collective planning assumptions did not stand up against reality”.

The inquiry also saw a 2014 report titled ‘Wales Health and Social Care Influenza Pandemic Preparedness and Response Guidance’. This document indicated that the Welsh government had been advised to make preparations to deal with 12,000 to 15,000 excess deaths over a 15-week period.

During the first 12 weeks of the pandemic there were 2,257 deaths involving Covid-19 in Wales.

But Gething admitted that “we were not as prepared as we could and should have been” to deal with the numbers of people who died, and this lack of preparation meant there was “additional pain for bereaved families”.

The inquiry continues.