The chief executive of a social care charity has launched a blistering attack on Boris Johnson’s “cowardly” and “appalling” comments after the prime minister appeared to blame care home owners for the high death toll.
Expressing his anger at Mr Johnson’s remarks, the chief executive officer of Community Integrated Care, Mark Adams, accused the government of re-writing history and claimed there had been a “travesty of leadership” during the health crisis.
As deaths of care home residents with Covid-19 approached 20,000, the prime minister said on Monday that “we discovered too many care homes didn’t really follow the procedures in the way that they could have but we’re learning lesson the whole time”.
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Care providers said the basis for Mr Johnson’s comments were unclear, while the National Care Forum (NCF) said they were “neither accurate nor welcome” and urged him to start “turning the dial up on reform and down on blame”.
Asked what he made of the prime minister’s comments on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Adams added: “I probably can’t say on national radio. Let’s just say unbelievably disappointed. This at the best was clumsy and cowardly.”
He went on: “But to be honest with you if this is genuinely his view I think we’re almost entering a Kafkaesque alternative reality where the government set the rules, we follow them, they don’t like the results, they then deny setting them. It is hugely frustrating.
“You’ve got 1.6m social care workers who when most of us were locked away in our bunkers waiting out Covid and really trying to protect our family, we’ve got these brave people on minimum wage often with no sickness cover at all going into work to protect our parents, our grandparents, our children, putting their own health and potentially lives at risk.
“And then to get perhaps the most senior man in the country turning around and blaming them on what has been an absolute travesty of leadership from the government, I just think it’s appalling.”
When asked whether his staff were being tested enough, he said: “We didn’t test social care until the end of May. So us, like most social care operators, had our losses before we started having any testing at all.
“Yes, the testing has now reached a point where most of our people in care homes and most of the residents have been tested once but once is absolutely useless because if you get tested and then get back on the bus and pick up the virus on the bus, within a week you’re potentially asymptomatic and infectious.
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“We have been crying out for weekly or ideally twice-weekly testing for months and we’ve only just got that commitment – it is a question of the horse bolting and shutting the stable door.”
On Monday evening, Downing Street insisted the prime minister had not blamed care homes for what happened.
“Throughout this crisis, care homes have done a brilliant job under very difficult circumstances,” a spokesperson said. “The PM was pointing out that nobody knew what the correct procedures were because the extent of asymptomatic transmission was not known at the time.”
Alok Sharma, the business secretary, also claimed on the BBC that the prime minister had been pointed out that no-one had known what the correct procedures were.
“Specifically the point that the prime minister was making yesterday, I think what he was actually pointing out was that nobody knew what the correct procedures were at the time because quite frankly we didn’t know what the extent of the asymptomatic transmission was,” he said.
