Bereaved families have said Matt Hancock’s evidence to the Covid inquiry “was full of excuses and completely devoid of accountability” as he described discharging untested patients into care homes as “the least worst option”.
In his testimony to the UK Covid-19 inquiry on Wednesday, the former health secretary defended the decision to move hospital patients into care homes during the early weeks of the pandemic to free up bed space.
“Nobody has yet provided me with an alternative that was available at the time that would have saved more lives,” he said. “I still can’t see a decision that would have been less bad. None of the options were good. It was the least worst decision that could have been taken at the time. While I wish there had been a better option, I still can’t find one.
“The likelihood of things being worse if people had stayed in hospital was very high.”
A spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, a group of nearly 7,000 people, said Hancock’s evidence “was full of excuses and completely devoid of accountability”.
“We’ve waited years for this moment, hoping for truth. What we got was finger-pointing and evasion,” they said. “Our loved ones were left to die without PPE, without testing or protection. Other countries protected their care homes. Ours were abandoned. Hancock lied to us then and he’s still dodging responsibility now.”
They said his testimony suggested he was “powerless to change life-saving guidance for care homes”, a “claim that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny”.
Hancock said the discharge policy, which was later ruled illegal in a high court judgment, was “formally a government decision” but that it was “driven” by the then NHS chief executive, Simon Stevens. He also said that while he had not taken the decision himself, he took responsibility for it.
Stevens is not listed to testify at the inquiry, despite calls from campaign groups for him to do so.
Hancock was giving evidence as part of the sixth module of the inquiry, focusing specifically on the care sector. Earlier this week, a senior civil servant said there had been a “generational slaughter within care homes” in written evidence to the inquiry.
Almost 46,000 care home residents died with Covid in England and Wales between March 2020 and January 2022, many of them in the early weeks of the pandemic.
The decision to rapidly discharge hospital patients to care homes in order to free up beds, when testing and isolation facilities were not yet widely available, has been strongly criticised for causing rapid spread of the disease in care homes.
In 2022, the high court said the policy not to isolate discharged hospital patients in the first weeks of the pandemic without testing was “irrational”.
Hancock said the ruling had been “very frustrating” because he was not asked to be involved, and claimed the outcome would have been different if he had given evidence.
On Tuesday, a care home owner and manager giving evidence to the inquiry said she had refused to allow untested hospital patients into her nursing home, and was told she would be reported to the care inspectorate for bed blocking.
Hancock said that isolation of discharged patients had not been clinically recommended at the time, but “in hindsight” it should have been.
He heavily criticised Public Health England (PHE) for not responding effectively to the seriousness of the crisis. “I got so frustrated with PHE I abolished them,” he said.
When questioned about whether there had been enough staff to care for the discharged patients, amid evidence of a widespread shortage of carers, Hancock said: “We knew that people would do what they needed to do.”
He has also been heavily criticised for his claims that a “protective ring” had been placed around care homes, previously admitting to the inquiry that it was not an “unbroken circle”.
The care sector module of the inquiry is expected to run until the end of July.