Care home assurances were ‘a despicable lie’
Daughters united in grief condemn former health minister following ruling over care home deaths
‘I feel terrible guilt. I feel as though he was locked in to die’
THEY stood outside the Royal Courts of Justice, two women who were unknown to each other before the pandemic, but who have been brought together by tragedy.
Cathy Gardner spoke first, delivering a steely reading of a prepared statement. Matt Hancock’s boast that a “protective ring” encircled care homes, Dr Gardner said, was “a despicable lie of which he ought to be ashamed and for which he ought to apologise”.
Then spoke Fay Harris, more downcast in demeanour but no less forthright.
“I have lost precious years with my wonderful dad,” she told journalists.
Both women lost fathers in early 2020 – fathers who, they argued, might still be alive were it not for hospital patients being discharged into care homes without having been tested for Covid-19.
Michael Gibson, born in 1931, had been a superintendent registrar of births and deaths. His own death, which occurred in 2020, when he was 88, has become as notable as any of those that he registered during his career.
“He was in a home and should have been safe,” Dr Gardner told The Independent that year. Mr Gibson, who had advanced dementia, had fallen ill a couple of weeks before the first lockdown of the pandemic. Staff at his care home were unable to procure tests for Covid19, but that is the virus that is believed to have struck down Mr Gibson.
A week after lockdown began, Dr Gardner drove from her home in Sidmouth, Devon, to the care home in Oxfordshire, Cherwood House Care Centre, where her father was housed. By now, visitors were banned from care homes. Dr Gardner was shown to the back of the building, where, in the dark, she was allowed to look through her father’s window as he slept.
It was the last time she saw him alive. Mr Gibson’s death, which took place the following day – April 3 – was ascribed to “probable Covid”. The virus is thought to have been brought into the home by a resident who had been discharged from hospital.
Dr Gardner, whose doctorate is in virology, “realised something was badly wrong”. When she heard Mr Hancock boast about the “protective ring”, she recounted, “my chin nearly hit the floor, because all of us who were involved in any way with care homes at the start of the pandemic knew that was absolutely not true.
“It was a lie,” she said. “It was a lie then and it is a lie now.”
Sixty miles from Cherwood Care Centre is Marlfield, a care home in Alton, Hampshire. One of its residents, a former Royal Marine called Don Har- ris, was due to turn 90 in October 2020. His daughter, Fay Harris, had planned a special celebration: a trip aboard a boat, adapted for people in wheelchairs, from which Mr Harris could once again see Portsmouth, where he had been stationed, from the sea.
Mr Harris was told of these plans in April 2020, when Covid-19 was ripping through care homes. The virus killed him on May 1 that year. Marlfield had 73 beds and lost 24 residents, it was reported, after a Covid-19 outbreak.
Mr Harris was one of them.
“Physically my dad was fit and he was well,” his daughter said. “He always had a smile on his face. When we left him he was mobile. He was strong and he was a fighter. He had Alzheimer’s and had had care problems, but he came through them all.
“He should not have died, he should have been on that birthday trip.”
Instead of taking her father to Portsmouth, Ms Harris, 58 and from Alton, found herself taking the Government to court. “We need to find out what happened,” she said in 2020.
“I do not want anyone else to go through what we have been through as a family. I feel terrible guilt. I feel as though he was locked in to die.”
In July 2020, it was reported that Ms Harris was applying to join a legal action to take Mr Hancock, to court. Almost two years later, that journey ended with yesterday’s seismic verdict.