6. Submissions on Behalf of the Welsh Local Government Association by Mr Allen KC

Mr Allen: My Lady, can you hear me?

Lady Hallett: Hear you but can’t see – ah, yes. Got you, both hear you and see you.

Mr Allen: Ah, good, thank you.

Well, good morning. I must thank you, first, for your work so far on this module, which is so important for all people in Wales.

Your report will be read in due course by a wide audience, including the families of the bereaved and those seriously ill with Covid and Long Covid, politicians and officers past and present, and many volunteers who were involved and may be again, and their organisations, and others in civil society, and of course key officers in the Welsh local authorities and their partner organisations who did so much to respond to the emergency and support their communities throughout.

The WLGA, the Welsh Local Government Association, that I represent, is sure that your report will provide a comprehensive and critical understanding and description of the key events in Wales during the pandemic. Yet, my Lady, we all know that while the past can be understood, it cannot be undone. So in the WLGA’s submission, what may well prove to be most important are the recommendations for future action that will emerge from this understanding.

That is especially so if they are clear, meaningful and purposeful, as we expect they will be, so that if and when the people of Wales were ever to suffer another pandemic, its governance would prove to be better prepared and more focused and able to act more swiftly and effectively.

The WLGA therefore sees this module as our collective chance to think hard about what is necessary to make that better future a real possibility. That said, my closing remarks do not need to be very long. The WLGA has already made detailed submissions, which I do not need to repeat. These are in the closings submissions for Module 1, my opening remarks for this module, and the two witness statements from its chief executive, Dr Llewelyn and, indeed, his evidence, which actually has been referred to several times this morning.

The WLGA hopes and believes that you will find that those recommendations made in those submissions and evidence are both detailed and appropriately targeted. Nothing has been said in either the written or oral evidence in this module that has caused the association to want to go back on them, so I don’t need to amend, paraphrase or repeat them now.

Today in my closing remarks I have only four points to make for the WLGA.

The association thinks it’s likely that you will already have them well in mind, so we do add that these points are made orally as much for the no less important, collateral purpose of ensuring that the Welsh Government and relevant national bodies see where we stand and pick up on them. Each is a call for urgent consideration for their immediate adoption.

Firstly, there is a fundamental issue concerning the timing and degree of engagement by significant Welsh bodies with the WLGA and its member local authorities. On this, the WLGA submits that though strategic engagement between local government leaders and Welsh Government ministers, including the First Minister, was good and improved throughout the crisis, yet this was not always reflected within and across government at official level.

From the very beginning, the Welsh Government, the NHS and Public Health Wales should have had a much richer engagement with local government in order to understand how policy proposals could be best operationalised. The failure to do this was a significant oversight and it led to delay and to a suboptimal national response, and must not be repeated.

This is a call for a major change of perspective. The WLGA seeks a better and earlier engagement built on trust and a respect for the capabilities, resourcefulness and flexibility of local government. Welsh Government should set strategy and describe rather than prescribe detailed policy if they are to allow, as they must, local authorities and their partners to be agile and adaptable in responding to local circumstances with urgency.

And as local government has significant resource issues, so it must also be understood that if new tasks are to be undertaken while the old are maintained, then either more resource will be needed or it will be necessary to have shared co-operative thinking to re-align existing resources to those new tasks.

Later in the pandemic, as the WLGA has said explicitly, the need to engage at the formative stage with local government did begin to be better understood within and across Welsh Government. Had there been fuller, early and consistent involvement of local government across all aspects of Welsh Government, then national preparedness would have been more resilient. The WLGA has noted, as we feel sure you have, that there has been some recognition of this point in the oral evidence you’ve received. There has certainly been no contrary argument. And there must be no danger of that recognition being lost; it needs to be known that there is comprehensive organisational learning throughout all the layers of Welsh Government concerning early engagement, the need for trust in local government, and how this can and must be utilised to ensure the most practical and effective policy development.

My Lady, there’s a consequential second point here. This concerns the process of review and capture of the lessons that should be learnt. As the WLGA said in its written closing submissions in Module 1, see generally paragraph 147, the value in such early co-working and co-design must be captured and owned collectively at all levels of government in Wales. It is relevant to policy decisions concerning all the main issues, such as stand-up arrangements, operational delivery, financial, technology issues, staffing and communication skills.

Unfortunately, you will have heard that, although there have been lessons learnt reviews, these have not been conducted on a fully inclusive basis, planning together for the future.

My Lady, that has to be put right straightaway, because the process of learning from the past is a whole-system issue, and not merely one for the Welsh Government alone.

To aid this, the WLGA has discussed and recommended, see particularly Dr Llewelyn’s second witness statement at paragraphs 47 to 54, that there should be a programme of secondments and multi-agency learning, and we commend these proposals to you.

Thirdly, while a focus on the health service is important, this must not obscure the need for an equal focus on the services provided by local authorities. It was inevitable, given the terrible statistics about the potential for hospitals to be overrun, that there was a heightened awareness of the precious role of the health service, and the WLGA does not in any way criticise this heightened awareness. Yet it is submitted that it is also absolutely important that central government politicians need, in such times of crisis, to give equal consideration to the critical roles of the wider public sector and local government in particular.

The evidence before this Inquiry has made it obvious why this is so: people desperately needed support in the community in almost every way that it’s possible to imagine, and that responsibility fell to local government. It played a role fully comparable in importance to that of the health service in managing issues such as schools, hubs, free school meals, key workers, shielding, logistics for testing, NPI enforcement, and of course business support.

The last point, my Lady, that the WLGA wishes to make in these oral submissions is that the pre-existing legislation is not fit for purpose of supporting the country through global emergencies of equivalent scale and length of time. It is an issue of legislative adequacy. I’ll mention the Civil Contingencies Act first.

Through both Modules 1 and 2B, the WLGA has commented and Dr Llewelyn has explained that the Civil Contingencies Act, whilst adequate for short-term local emergencies controlling small-scale communicable disease transmissions, was not designed for a prolonged and profound emergency such as a global pandemic.

This is because it lacks a key political dimension: it fails to recognise, and so to accommodate, the importance of political leadership, both in the development and ownership of strategy and in the oversight of key decision-making during both the response and recovery phases.

Now, the Civil Contingencies Act is not the only enactment that requires reconsideration. It is an equally important task for the Inquiry to consider the efficacy of existing public health legislation, which, though adequate similarly for controlling small-scale communicable disease transmissions, was not designed for a global pandemic.

There are several important issues concerning this which have been set out in the evidence and submissions. One key concern that must be mentioned today is the interrelationship of this legislation with other crisis-related measures. For instance, there is a significant issue as to whether, in the event of a future pandemic, public health legislation should have primacy over the Civil Contingencies Act, or whatever may replace it in due course, and, if not, what relationship it should have.

The urgent enactment of a new Coronavirus Act in 2020 to meet the Covid-19 emergencies has already demonstrated that both pieces of legislation did not meet the test of being fully fit for purpose in such a global pandemic. So the WLGA sees it as being a significant challenge for the Inquiry to make recommendations that would fill that void by providing a much greater preparedness for the future and avoiding any need again to enact emergency legislation. And these should aim to put local government on a firmer and more confident footing, so as to be able to act with legal competence from the outset and thus to undertake their key task of protecting local communities and the vulnerable from the kinds of harm that they endured. And, of course, it must be said yet again that local government must be adequately resourced to fulfil their roles.

My Lady, those are our submissions, and I must thank you and the Inquiry team again for undertaking this task that is so important to Wales. And, on a more personal note, for permitting me to make these submissions to you virtually rather than in person. Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Mr Allen. Thank you very much for your help.

Right, I think we now have Mr Kinnier.