Hancock blames health body over Covid care home failings
MATT HANCOCK has blamed Public Health England (PHE) for sending Covid patients into care homes after the High Court yesterday ruled the Government policy broke the law.
The former health secretary says today that PHE failed to alert him to the asymptomatic transmission of coronavirus. His claims came after High Court judges ruled that the Department for Health and Social Care’s (DHSC) policy of discharging hospital patients to care homes during the early stages of the pandemic was “unlawful”.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, Whitehall officials alleged that Prof Duncan Selbie, the former chief executive of PHE, was ultimately responsible for informing Mr Hancock of the risks of the policy.
More than 20,000 elderly and disabled care home residents died after contracting Covid in the pandemic’s first wave.
‘The risk of asymptomatic transmission was not included in the advice I received as health secretary’
Following yesterday’s ruling, lawyers and care industry leaders claimed that it could “open the floodgates” for compensation. Bereaved families and charities also said the ruling proves that the “protective ring” that Mr Hancock said was put around care homes was “nonexistent”, a “sickening lie” and “a joke”.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Mr Hancock says the risk associated with asymptomatic transmission “was not, as the High Court judgment says, included in the advice I received from PHE as health secretary”.
In a thinly veiled criticism as to why that was, he added: “It’s a natural human tendency to stick with whatever we already think is the case.”
In their ruling, Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Garnham concluded that both the DHSC and PHE “simply failed to take into account” the risk to elderly
and vulnerable residents from nonsymptomatic transmission of Covid, as well as the “growing awareness” of this risk throughout March 2020.
Prof Selbie received a payoff of £375,000 after the contract for his £190,000-a-year PHE post ended in August 2020. The organisation was disbanded last year and has since transferred its health protection functions to the UK Health Security Agency. Prof Selbie is currently working as a senior adviser to the DHSC. Neither he nor the department responded to requests for comment regarding the extent of his responsibility for briefing Mr Hancock about asymptomatic transmission.
The former health secretary, who was replaced by Sajid Javid in June last year, claimed that the High Court ruling had exonerated him and that he had been cleared “of any wrongdoing” because PHE “failed to tell ministers what they knew about asymptomatic transmission” of Covid.
The High Court judges concluded that policies in March and April 2020 were “irrational” as they failed to state that those discharged from hospitals “should, so far as practicable, be kept apart from other residents for up to 14 days”. They added: “Since there is no evidence that this question was considered by the secretary of state, or that he was asked to consider it, it is not an example of a political judgment on a finely balanced issue. Nor is it a point on which any of the expert committees had advised that no guidance was required.”
Boris Johnson said he wanted to “renew my apologies and sympathies” to grieving relatives, adding: “The thing we didn’t know, in particular, was that Covid could be transmitted asymptomatically in the way that it was, and that was something that I wish we had known more about at the time.”
However, the risks of asymptomatic transmission had been highlighted by figures including Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser for England, who said this was “quite likely” as early as March 13 2020. Varying levels of risk had also been outlined in papers from late January, the ruling said.
The judicial review was brought by Dr Cathy Gardner and Fay Harris, whose fathers, Michael Gibson and Donald Harris, died after testing positive.
Their solicitor, Paul Conrathe from Sinclairslaw, said: “It’s possible that care home providers and relatives who lost loved ones in the first wave could possibly bring compensation claims.”
Nadra Ahmed, chairman of the National Care Association, agreed that the decision did “open the floodgates for potential claims to be brought against government policy”. She said: “This will be especially pertinent where the individual was not given a choice.”
Helen Wildbore, director of the Relatives & Residents Association, said the ruling proved the “protective ring around care homes was non-existent” and older people were “abandoned at the outset of the pandemic”. She added: “Bereaved families will be left asking why more wasn’t done to protect their loved ones and how many lives could have been saved.”
A government spokesman said it was a “very difficult decision” to discharge patients into care homes, taken when evidence on asymptomatic transmission was “extremely uncertain”. The Government “acknowledged the judges’ comments” and would “respond in more detail in due course”, they added.