National Assembly for Wales

Good afternoon and welcome to the meeting, on Monday 18 November, of the Wales COVID-19 Inquiry Special Purpose Committee. We've received apologies from two Members—Buffy Williams and Rhianon Passmore. However, Hefin David will be joining us a little bit later to cover for Rhianon. This meeting is bilingual. Headsets provide simultaneous translation on channel 1 and sound amplification on channel 2. Participants joining online can access translation by clicking on the globe icon on Zoom. Do Members have any interests or declarations they wish to declare? No. Okay.

Item 2, then, is the motion to resolve to exclude the public from the remainder of the meeting. But before I do that, let me just say that, at the start of the year, the committee held briefing sessions with experts in civil contingencies and emergency planning to assist the committee in preparing for its future scrutiny of issues arising from the UK COVID inquiry module 1 report on the resilience and preparedness of the United Kingdom as they relate to Wales. These experts were identified by a thorough process of contacting over 700 academics from organisations across the UK, asking for expressions of interest in assisting us. After discussions with a number of academics, Professor Rowena Hill, a professor of resilience, emergencies and disaster science at Nottingham Trent University, and Richard Pickford, manager of Nottingham Civic Exchange, the university think tank, located in the School of Social Sciences, were identified as the most suitable academics to provide support to the committee.

Following the publication of the UK COVID-19 inquiry's module 1 report, Professor Hill and Mr Pickford have now been commissioned to prepare a gap analysis of the report, with the Welsh interim operational review. The committee has invited them to attend today's meeting to provide an update on civil contingencies. There will also be an opportunity to ask questions of the academics and shape the direction of their work in preparing the gap analysis, which will assist the committee in its evidence gathering, to identify potential gaps that require further consideration. We've also invited Dr Simon Williams, who has been appointed as a long-term expert adviser to the committee. Dr Williams is based at Swansea University, where he is a researcher in behavioural science and public health. He is also a consultant to the World Health Organization.

As this session is to allow Members to discuss and feed into the gap analysis process before the experts begin their work, it therefore relates to internal committee business, and I propose that it is held in a private session. Therefore, I propose, in accordance with Standing Order 17.42, that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of today's meeting. Are all Members content? Okay. We'll move into private.