For the last couple of years, everyone eyes had been glued to the Welsh Government Covid press conferences.
Mark Drakeford went from virtual unknown to a man who could stop you s eeing your nan in a care home. Those televised press conferences were watched by hundreds of thousands of people (in a country of only 3m). Sometimes they were daily, other times weekly and now every three weeks.
Sometimes the First Minister would be up for questions and other times it would be UK Government ministers. But there was one consistent thread that ran through almost every single press conference and that was the person who asked the last question - Tom Magner from Carers World Live.
Read more: Unpaid carers in Wales to receive £500 payment
Aged 68, Tom has been a mainstay of Wales’ Covid press conferences since the beginning. During that time he has been relentless (while remaining incredibly polite) in his questioning over the shortcomings in support for carers since Covid first arrived in Wales.
Carers World is an online radio station specifically designed for people with caring responsibilities. This is a group who Tom says have been woefully overlooked throughout the crisis.
“They have been ignored,” Tom told WalesOnline. “In the early days it was protecting the NHS. In other words, keep the hospital safe. So they forgot about things like patients being discharged into care homes, all these so they're just focused on was NHS, NHS, NHS, that's all they were interested in. This means paid workers. Now in Wales, you've heard me quoted loads and loads of times and it comes from a Senedd debate saying that 96% of caring in Wales is provided by unpaid carers. Therefore 4% is by paid care workers. So what's happened is always focuses on the 4% Leaving the 96% to fend for themselves.”
According to Tom, the pandemic meant that many of the hard fought rights that carers had battled for were overlooked. “What I'm doing is looking at life through the lens of the unpaid carers,” he said. “They'd established over a number of years, a range of particular rights. And those have all been compressed into one act in each of the four nations of the UK. In Wales it's the social services Well Being Wales Act, in England, it's the Care Act. Basically these acts changed the emphasis.
"Before unpaid carriers had to plead with their local authorities to get services. But what these Act did was to say the onus is on the local authority to come and ask. They need to find you, to seek you out, identify you and help you and during particular needs assessment. That's the point on March 23, but as soon as the lockdown started and the Coronavirus Act, basically the effect on unpaid carers was they were abandoned.”
To say that Tom’s road to asking questions at the press conference has been winding would be a massive understatement. Like Huw Stephens and Jason Mohammed he started on hospital radio. This led to him covering local councils where a series of chance meetings led to him becoming a researcher for the BBC’s Watchdog program and also Crimewatch. He also works as an expert witness in court cases.
“I'm a mechanical electrical engineer by qualification,” he said. “In criminal and civil justice systems, you have expert witnesses who are allowed to express an opinion. So if there's an incident, I investigate it, I look at the evidence, I've provided my report to assist the court in understanding engineering principles behind the case, and then to analyse the available information in the light of those engineering principles.”
That forensic attention to detail has helped Tom pick apart some of the shortcomings in the Welsh Government response with regard to carers. He said: “When you're examined and cross examined in court you have to be careful. You have to think about the exact words you want to use. You have to listen carefully to the answer the question, not the question you think it is, but the question is actually being asked. So over time, you get used to this.”
Despite not having a formal journalism background Tom is no pushover when it comes to questions. At what point, then education minister Kirsty Williams addressed, perhaps slightly patronisingly at the end of a press conference with "last but by no means least Tom Magner! It's great to see you Tom". To this Tom replied smoothly without breaking stride "you might not be so happy after I ask my questions".
