CARDIFF — Two police officers stand outside a featureless low-rise building, set back from the ring road behind a chain link fence. It’s the only signal to passers-by that anything unusual is happening at the Mercure Hotel, whose typical guests are hen parties, French rugby fans and business conferences. But it’s here, three miles north of Cardiff, that decisions made by the Welsh government during the Covid pandemic are being scrutinised at oddly breakneck speed.

The Mercure Hotel itself was refurbished in December 2019, only to spend much of the next year vacant: three months after it reopened, Britain’s hospitality sector was shut down entirely save for the few sites used to quarantine travellers. Four years on, more than 12,000 people have died from Covid in Wales.

But after the initial restrictions of early 2020, the country saw an influx of tourists to holiday destinations like Barmouth and Aberdyfi, fueling transmission spikes as people fled the claustrophobia of a three-month lockdown in garden-less flats. Wales’s Labour-led government, helmed by first minister Mark Drakeford, struggled to make decisions while beholden to the UK government, blaming (reasonably or not) Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak for Wales’ limited powers as a devolved nation.

Much to the anger of the bereaved, Drakeford had refused calls for Wales to hold its own Covid inquiry. This has meant that questions about how his government handled the pandemic have had to be crammed into just three weeks, as part of a sub-module to the main UK inquiry. By contrast, the Westminster government was scrutinised over nine weeks at the end of 2023, while Scotland has been holding its own inquiry as well as featuring in a UK module.

During those three weeks, a packed schedule of politicians, civil servants and academics faced questioning from the inquiry on subjects ranging from missing WhatsApp messages to Rishi Sunak’s controversial ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme. The inquiry team, decamped from their usual home of Paddington in west London, heard how the Welsh government had no idea the UK and a private company had opened a testing centre, and that the UK’s secretary of state for Wales had accused Drakeford and his administration of bringing in different rules from other parts of the union “for the sake of it”.

The three weeks culminated in evidence from Drakeford himself. Wearing a daffodil pin and taking his oath in Welsh, the first minister – in his last week in the job – was reluctant to admit fault. But during his one day of evidence, he did accept with many qualifications that things could have been different – with hindsight, at least.

“I’m not here to try to defend actions,” he said. “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.”

But Drakeford’s evidence raised more questions than it answered about Wales’ ‘firebreak’ lockdown in the winter of 2020. As cases rose, Wales shut bars, restaurants, schools and gyms and banned contact between households in October 2020, something Drakeford has called a “failed experiment”.

At the time, Wales asked the UK to speed up delivery of a new furlough scheme to cover the period of the firebreak. But the UK government left the nation high and dry, launching the ‘job retention scheme’ only when the rest of the UK implemented its own lockdown a fortnight or so later. Drakeford went so far as to claim that an internal Treasury email – produced during the hearing with some slight drama – proved it had been UK policy not to let devolved administrations go further with restrictions than Westminster. The inquiry’s chair, crossbench peer Heather Hallett, didn’t agree.

When it came to Wales’s care homes, where 8,236 people died in 2020, Drakeford and former health minister Vaughan Gething were asked why it had taken until 29 April 2020 – 13 days later than England – to mandate Covid tests for those being discharged from hospital. Gething told the inquiry that a lack of “information” from Westminster had resulted in the delay, though was not specific about what he meant.

Drakeford claimed his “line of reasoning at the time” was that “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”. But, he added, he regretted “everything that led to the loss of life”.

The inquiry notably took place against the backdrop of a political changing of the guard. Mark Drakeford announced not long after the sudden death of his wife in 2023 that he would be stepping down as first minister of Wales. The only two politicians left in the race, Gething and Jeremy Miles, also gave evidence in the last week.

Miles appeared alongside two other ministers, not allowing a huge amount of time to dig into his role during Covid. The education minister – who was the Welsh government’s chief legal adviser at the time – was challenged over harsh penalties for Covid rule-breaking, and ambiguity over guidance for people to stay within five miles of their homes in May 2020.

It’s clear that bereaved families, after just ten total days of Welsh evidence, do not feel they have got the answers they hoped for. On the final day of hearings, their lawyers criticised the government for having “sloth-like urgency”, asking why they were not faster when knowledge of asymptomatic transmission emerged, and why so many died under their watch. Drakeford had previously ruled out a Wales specific Covid inquiry on the basis he thought UK ministers would not participate in it, but there is nothing to stop a future leader from implementing one – though neither of the two candidates responded to questions about whether this was their intention.

Meanwhile, Welsh ministers will likely appear in future UK modules exploring procurement, vaccines and healthcare systems – but if Wales is again treated as an add-on it’s hard to say whether these will satisfy those who lost so much, either.