A CALLOUS BETRAYAL OF OUR MOST VULNERABLE

The care home corona scandal goes into the bedrock of our society: the failure to protect our most frail... a grotesque refusal to equip their carers... who are paid a pittance by fatcat bosses... in a system left to rot by our social care failure – as IAN BIRRELL reveals in this devastating analysis firms moved in like starving sharks. Often they parked big profits taken from taxpayers offshore while fatcat bosses pocketed fortunes and staff on the frontline – who are now risking their lives – were paid peanuts.

Look closer at HC-One, which has about 22,000 care home beds. A recent investigation by the Financial Times found it had paid no tax since 2011, yet it handed investors through a complex web of companies almost £50million in dividends over the past two years alone. Four Seasons, which owns the Glasgow home hit by 13 deaths, is currently in the hands of an American hedge fund after its previous owner, a prominent British private equity outfit, lost an £825million investment gamble on the group.

Barchester Healthcare, another major provider, is owned by three Irish billionaires. It quintupled profits last year and handed one of its executives a £915,000 pay package. Care UK, which runs the Stanley Park home, awarded one director £900,000, according to latest accounts.

CareTech, which has quietly become one of the biggest players in social care, paid the pair of brothers who founded it £1.7million last year while giving another £1.48million to their family in dividends after boasting in its annual report about surging company revenues.

Some firms pay team leaders with weighty responsibilities at their care homes less than £9-an-hour and crucial night staff get minimum wages. Little wonder there were 122,000 vacancies and a high churn in jobs when this crisis struck with such force.

Many of the dedicated workers are migrants – just as we are seeing with lots of the faces staring out from newspapers of doctors and nurses felled by coronavirus. Yet the Government insulted such staff by deeming them unskilled in its migration plans.

We must not flinch from hard questions in these difficult times as we look to rebuild society and strengthen preparations against any future pandemic. This virus was always going to pose a terrible threat to people in care homes. But is the devastation worse because an unloved social care system was allowed to rot behind closed doors in a callous betrayal of the country’s most vulnerable citizens?