Who might the government seek to blame for the UK's Covid-19 failings?
While ministers insist that it is too early to fully consider what lessons might be learned from the coronavirus outbreak, the UK’s death toll – the highest in Europe – is expected to prompt an inquiry into the handling of the pandemic.
In recent weeks, the government has been accused of seeking to preemptively shift the narrative on responsibility for the country’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak and blame others for what went wrong.
Care homes
Nearly 20,000 of the UK’s 44,000 confirmed coronavirus deaths have been in care homes, leading critics to claim that the government is more exposed over failures in this sector than any other area.
The most high-profile blame row came on Monday, when Boris Johnson prompted fury from care chiefs, charities, unions and MPs by saying that “too many care homes didn’t really follow the procedures in the way that they could have.”
No 10 swiftly backtracked, claiming Johnson was saying “nobody knew what the correct procedures were” at the start of the outbreak, because of the problem of asymptomatic people spreading the virus.
Care sector representatives, however, argue that this appears to be a further attempt to avoid official responsibility. The head of one charity said Johnson was seeking to present “a Kafkaesque alternative reality” and condemning care homes for abiding by the government’s own regulations.
At the height of the pandemic in April, public health officials proposed a lockdown of care homes, but it was rejected by the government. And while a pandemic planning exercise in 2018 warned about the risk of cross-infection by care staff, there were no measures in place to prevent this. A Public Health England study found that temporary care workers had transmitted Covid-19 between care homes.
Care operators also say they have struggled significantly with low supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) for staff, and with an inadequate system of testing. They have also expressed concern at a policy that allowed 25,000 people to be discharged from hospital into care homes without tests to ensure they were virus-free. Public Health England
During a speech last week, Johnson recounted the early weeks of the pandemic, when, as he put it, “parts of government … seemed to respond so sluggishly that sometimes it seemed like that recurring bad dream when you are telling your feet to run and your feet won’t move”.
Friendly newspapers were briefed that, by this, the prime minister meant Public Health England (PHE), and that the quango, established in 2013, could be cut back or axed.
Unnamed Whitehall sources told newspapers that PHE was to blame for the slow start to Covid-19 testing in the UK, and had made other mistakes, such as missing the start of a localised resurgence of the virus in Leicester.
As public health officials hit back, complaining this was deeply unfair, Downing Street declined to confirm