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Delyth Jewell, who is the deputy leader of Plaid Cymru, is one of four regional Senedd Members serving the South Wales East region.

This week is a momentous week in UK politics: by the time you’ll be reading this column, there will be a new government in Westminster. Whoever wins that election (though the likely result has long been known), the voice of Wales will, inevitably, be diminished in Westminster. 

The number of Welsh MPs has been cut from 40 to 32 seats, and we will need to fight all the harder to get our voices heard. Westminster cannot keep taking Wales for granted, or sidelining our concerns. As a result of this cut in the number of Welsh MPs, the voice of our Senedd will become all the more important in the months and years ahead.

Much has been going on in the Senedd over the past few weeks. I have raised concerns about a number of health-related issues, including the evidence given by Welsh ministers to the UK Covid-19 inquiry relating to deleted messages, and issues relating to a dreadful incident at the Grange Hospital some months ago, when the wrong bodies were delivered to families for burial.

I asked the chief legal officer of the Welsh Government, counsel general Mick Antoniw MS, whether any members of the Welsh Government had requested legal advice about deleted messages, as well as what advice has been provided about messages that were revealed in the press in recent weeks.

My concerns in this matter are principally about processes, and the need for the government to learn lessons from what happened during the pandemic. I have been privileged to get to know a number of campaigners from the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice, who lost loved ones to Covid. Without a doubt, those families are owed answers from both the Welsh and UK governments.

None of this is about apportioning blame: it is about learning lessons in time for other public health crises in the future. Plaid Cymru believes that the only way that we will be able to find out the truth will be through holding a Wales Covid inquiry, which is what the families themselves have campaigned for so tirelessly over a long period of time. It is dismaying indeed that the Welsh Government continues to refuse to consent to a Welsh inquiry taking place.

In response to my queries, Senedd Members were told that the Welsh Government is co-operating fully with requests for information from the UK inquiry. 

The second issue I’d raised was a distressing one. Readers will remember that, a few months ago, the wrong bodies were delivered to families for burial by the Grange Hospital. Coupled with these concerns, I have been made aware of the alarm felt by the families of people who died in hospital during Covid that photographs were taken of people who were dying, or who had died in the hospital mortuary. 

Those people could not possibly have given their consent for photographs to be taken, and in the Senedd I have raised the fact that they surely would have had the right to privacy by law under the Human Rights Act 1998 (which sets out the rights to control how information about your private life is shared, including photographs that have been taken secretly.)

In the Senedd, I asked whether the Welsh Government has had discussions with the Human Tissue Authority about these issues which have arisen at the Grange hospital.

In response, the counsel general told me that they take the standard of NHS mortuary care and the dignity of the deceased extremely seriously. I was assured that the Welsh Government expects NHS health boards to comply with the requirements of the law to meet Human Tissue Authority standards, and to be open and honest when mistakes are made. 

I have been assured that Welsh Government officials are in routine contact with the Human Tissue Authority, and that officials are working to ensure that assurances on security and standards of mortuary care are fully complied with.

Health is a devolved matter, and the responsibility of the Welsh Government. I will keep raising concerns about these issues with the government.