Getty ImagesRules to try to limit the spread of Covid during the pandemic should have been the same across the UK, a former cabinet minister has said.
Simon Hart has claimed “politics in the decision-making” led to different restrictions on things like wearing face masks in Wales and England after being agreed by their respective governments.
“I just didn’t feel that decisions were being made purely on the basis of disease control and risk management,” said the former Welsh secretary and MP.
The Welsh government has been asked to comment.
“I do think the UK wide consistency would have been much, much simpler from the point of view of trying to impart a very clear but important message to residents of the UK,” he said.
Hart was the secretary of state for Wales from December 2019 to July 2022 and a Conservative MP for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire from 2010 to 2024.
He also served as parliamentary secretary to the Treasury [chief whip] between October 2022 and July 2024 and has just published his book, Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip.
Hart told BBC Radio Wales’ Sunday Supplement it included a “rather depressing reminder of some of the difficulties that we all encountered” during the pandemic and “if we ever have to do that kind of thing again, is there a better way of doing it?”
He said it was “made much more complicated by the fact that there were different rules in different places”.
Restrictions were drawn up by a Conservative government at Westminster and in Wales the rules were set by a Labour government in the Senedd.
Restrictions were imposed for more than two years after lockdown began in March 2020.
By January 2022, a lecturer in psychology said people were suffering “fatigue” and “uncertainty” over the varying Covid rules.
At that point, nightclubs were closed in Wales, with limits on hospitality, sports events and who people could meet, but in England restrictions were much less severe.
Mr Hart recalled train announcements being read out while he and other rail passengers were travelling through the Severn Tunnel to highlight a change in rules on wearing masks either side of the Wales-England border.
“More and more, as we went through the pandemic, I came to the conclusion that there was a lot of politics in the decision-making,” he said.
“I just didn’t feel that decisions were being made purely on the basis of disease control and risk management.
“Some of the speeches and comments that were being made by ministers in Cardiff were deliberately designed to drive a wedge between the two governments.
“And to cast just a degree of doubt into the minds of residents of Wales that the decisions being taken by UK government might have been at fault.”
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