The outgoing first minister of Wales has told the Covid inquiry his government should have taken “more stringent action” as coronavirus began to take hold in the UK.

Speaking at the hearings – which are currently taking place in a Cardiff hotel – Mark Drakeford defended the decisions made in early 2020, but said in hindsight he would have done things differently.

“Looking back on matters and given what we now know there is strong evidence to suggest that more stringent action could have and should have been taken sooner,” Drakeford admitted.

Responding to Welsh minister Eluned Morgan’s comments to the inquiry that Wales should have locked down a week earlier, Drakeford said this was “plausible”.

“That is with the lens of hindsight applied to it,” he added. “If we knew then what we know now, there are many things we might have done differently with better knowledge.”

Discussing whether the Welsh government took the virus seriously enough from the beginning, Drakeford said “signals” from scientists could have been acted on sooner.

“There’s a very plausible case – I'm not denying it at all – that that signal should have been read earlier,” said Drakeford.

While Drakeford did defend decisions made at the time, the first minister, who only has a week left in the job, made clear he did not want to say his government “did everything right.”

Care Homes

Discussing care homes, Drakeford said: “I’m not here to try to defend actions, the inquiry will draw its conclusions. I’m here to try and provide the best information I can about how we acted and why we acted.”

In Wales, guidance to test patients being discharged from care homes did not come in until 29 April 2020 – 13 days after the UK changed its guidance.

“​​You are discharging people back to their homes, some people live in care homes, but it is their home, and they are fit to be discharged there, and there are protections that can be put in place to try to manage the impact of the disease when they get there,” he said. “That was the line of reasoning that we were following at the time.”

But he added: “I absolutely regret everything that led to the loss of life”.

Drakeford had refused to hold a Wales-specific Covid inquiry, arguing that a UK inquiry would have a better ability to scrutinise the pandemic – despite some raising concerns about being cut short as a result of limited time.

So far, 12,532 people have died from Covid in Wales.

Voting closes tomorrow regarding who will succeed Drakeford as first minister. Only economics minister Vaughan Gething and education minister Jeremy Miles reached the threshold to make it to the final stage of the leadership election.

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