Secrecy and a shocking failure to protect the vulnerable

TODAY’S revelations that police are now investigating coronavirus deaths in two Scottish care homes are highly disturbing. The prospect of a corporate manslaughter probe raises more uncomfortable questions about the shocking failure to protect some of the most vulnerable members of society.

And it is increasingly clear that, wherever the police’s own investigations lead, tough questions must also be asked of Nicola Sturgeon and her Government.

The First Minister has made great play of being ‘transparent’, insisting that we are to be ‘treated like adults’. She intends to be ‘open’ in her decision-making. There is to be a ‘conversation with the people of Scotland’ on how best we all move through this. The truth has been very different.

Instead of transparency, openness and conversation, we have had secrecy, evasion, and contradiction. She has talked a good game but failed to deliver. When words don’t match up to delivery, we have a duty to call it out.

It is time to state her government’s record on Covid-19 for what it is: a failure of governance. We all deserve a lot better. The way the SNP has handled the situation in care homes, for example, has been a mixture of gross incompetence and cowardly evasion.

We now know that at the start of this crisis, the order went out from the Scottish Government to remove elderly people from hospitals and instead put them in residential homes. There was a reason for this: we needed to free up space in wards to cope with an expected surge in Covid cases.

But, for weeks, patients were transferred into care homes without being tested. We still have no idea how many positive patients went into care homes and spread the disease there.

As late as May 10 – two weeks ago – Health Secretary Jeane Freeman was claiming she didn’t know about the advice, which her own government had issued, permitting patients to be moved to care homes without a test.

Then we were told that advice was a mistake. Then, after that guidance was changed, Ms Freeman played down the number of people who had been moved. She and Ms Sturgeon suggested only around 300 people were involved.

Yet last week – and again only because of journalists and opposition parties asking questions – we discovered that the real figure for March and early April alone was actually more than 900.

In other words, THREE times the number suggested.

Nearly half of all Covid-19 deaths in Scotland have been in care homes – way more than the equivalent figure in England.

Appallingly, around 1,600 residents have died. The most vulnerable people in our society have paid the highest cost. The SNP has tried to keep that hidden too.

This litany of incompetence and misdirection is a national scandal.

As we first argued last year, Ms Freeman clearly needs to be replaced as Health Secretary.

But rather than being ‘open’, or allowing a ‘conversation’, the First Minister simply swats asides all criticism as a ‘politicised’ attack.

It’s not party politics to point out government failings. It’s the proper job of a responsible and effective Opposition. And it is not just on care homes that this government has questions to answer.

Last week, we discovered that two more Scottish firms had revealed staff developed coronavirus symptoms days after the Nike conference in Edinburgh. It is now clear that, while contact tracers tracked down some of those affected, many more were oblivious for weeks to the danger they were in – and only discovered it after a BBC documentary.

Today the widow of Danny Cairns, the first person identified as having died of coronavirus in Scotland, says Scotland scrapped contact tracing too soon.

She said that no one from her family was contact traced after her husband’s death – and had health officials been in touch she would have told them of the contacts they’d both had at their local church just a few days before.

This gets to the nub of the issue. What kind of transparency is it when it takes investigative reporters to let people know they may have been carrying Covid-19? Why is the truth only coming out now, nearly three months on, when Ministers knew all along? To say this makes a mockery of the SNP’s claims to openness is the understatement of the century. This isn’t a ‘conversation’. It’s a sham.

We are not being treated like adults; we are being treated like fools. The real problem is the Scottish Government does not appear to have learnt any lessons.

As we emerge from lockdown, so much depends on its ability to deliver a proper testing strategy.

We need care homes and hospitals tested routinely, so we know if the disease is coming back. We need to track the disease in the community, isolating those who have it, so we can be confident about going about our daily lives.

When I challenged the First Minister on this last week, she again denied there was a problem. Yet the evidence suggests otherwise.

Across the UK, 140,000 tests were carried out on Friday last week, May 22. Scotland’s share – around 6,000 a day from both NHS Scotland and drive- through and mobile sites – is way below our proportionate share.

That lack of capacity means routine testing in care homes will be impossible. As for tracking the disease, the necessary ‘contact tracers’ have still to be hired.

Put plainly, without a proper plan for testing, we won’t be able to see where the disease is spreading after we emerge from lockdown.

We’ll only get a sense of that when sick patients begin to turn up in hospital. By then it’ll be way too late. This can’t go on. People’s lives are at stake. Scotland deserves better.