Robert Buckland admits the government ‘CHOSE’ NHS over care homes

Justice Secretary Robert Buckland sparked fury today by admitting that ministers ‘chose’ to protect the NHS over care homes because there was not enough coronavirus testing capacity. 

Mr Buckland gave the clearest statement yet that a decision was made to prioritise the health service when the outbreak was at its most ferocious.

More than 11,000 people are now believed to have died in care homes since the disease started running rampant, around a quarter of the UK’s total toll. The government has been heavily criticised for sending patients back to homes from hospitals without tests, and not putting routine screening in place for staff and residents. 

Mr Buckland fuelled the row this morning by conceding the government had to make a ‘choice’ about where to deploy testing capacity – which was languishing at a few thousand a day in early March, although it has now been ramped up to over 100,000. 

‘I think we needed to make a choice about testing and we did decide to focus upon the NHS,’ he told Sky News. ‘The issue with care homes is that we’ve got many thousands of different providers, different settings, there have been lots of examples of care homes that have mercifully stayed infection free, but sadly far too many cases of infection and then death.’ 

Shadow care minister Liz Kendall said the remarks amounted to a concession that ‘ministers did not give care homes the protection they needed at the start of this pandemic’.

‘Social care and the NHS are both equally important in the fight against this virus and are inextricably linked. One cannot be prioritised above the other,’ she said. 

Care England chief Martin Green said it was a ‘significant’ statement from Mr Buckland and he hoped the government will ‘learn lessons’. 

The spat came after Dame Angela McLean, chief science adviser at the Ministry of Defence, highlighted the role capacity had played in key decisions at the daily media briefing last night.

Dame Angela said the advice given to ministers to abandon efforts to contact trade individual cases, which happened on March 12, ‘took account of the testing that was available’. 

‘With the testing we had the right thing to do was to focus it on people who were really sick in hospital… it was the right thing to do at the time,’ she said. 

She said the ‘scientific advice would be that you need to have a rapid and reliable testing system’. Asked if that was now true, Dame Angela replied: ‘I think it is getting better.’   

The Commons Science Committee said yesterday that hospital staff, care home workers and residents were put at risk because of a lack of for screening ‘when the spread of the virus was at its most rampant’.

Routine testing for those with symptoms was abandoned on March 12, when the government shifted to its ‘delay’ phase, with checks reserved for hospital patients and health staff.  

The ability to detect and crack down on cases is seen as crucial to getting the economy up and running, with unions warning workplaces and schools cannot be safe until the regime is in place. 

The committee hit out at Public Health England for the ‘pivotal decision’ to shun smaller labs and failure to make a ‘rigorous assessment’ of countries such as South Korea and Germany that had successfully ramped up testing.  

But PHE chief Duncan Selbie shot back that it was ‘not responsible’ for the testing strategy, which ‘has been led by the Department of Health and Social Care’. 

He insisted ‘any testing facility with the right technology and containment’ could have carried out checks after security restrictions were lowered on March 3.  

Health select committee chairman Jeremy Hunt told Boris Johnson today to be more transparent to show whether politicians have been given the right advice by scientists.

Swathes of evidence from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has not been published, while other parts have been released with a long time lag and sections blanked out. 

‘The only way to resolve this is to publish the scientific advice ministers were acting on,’ Mr Hunt told the Times.

‘We can’t possibly know whether government was following the science if we don’t know the advice they were given. If you publish the advice it gives a chance for other scientists to scrutinise it.’ 

In a letter to the PM, committee chairman Greg Clark identified a series of lessons to learn from the UK’s handling of the outbreak.

He said capacity must ‘urgently’ be built up for contact tracing, a key tactic in helping ease existing lockdown measures.

Mr Clark said: ‘Testing capacity has been inadequate for most of the pandemic so far.

‘Capacity was not increased early enough or boldly enough. Capacity drove strategy, rather than strategy driving capacity.’

Mr Hancock announced on April 2 that he wanted to reach 100,000 daily coronavirus tests by the end of the month.

The goal was reached for the first time on April 30 but sparked accusations the figures had been inflated, as they included tests which had been posted out but not completed.

The milestone has been reached a handful of times since.

Mr Clark said PHE had repeatedly failed to answer questions over the ‘pivotal’ decision to ignore mass testing in favour of other tactics.

He said: ‘The decision to pursue an approach of initially concentrating testing in a limited number of laboratories and to expand them gradually, rather than an approach of surging capacity through a large number of available public sector, research institute, university and private sector labs is one of the most consequential made during this crisis.

‘From it followed the decision on March 12 to cease testing in the community and retreat to testing principally within hospitals.’

He said the decision meant that residents in care homes and care home workers could not be tested at a time when the spread of the virus was at its most rampant.

Mr Clark wrote: ‘Had the public bodies responsible in this space themselves taken the initiative at the beginning of February, or even the beginning of March, rather than waiting until the Secretary of State imposed a target on April 2, knowledge of the spread of the pandemic and decisions about the response to it may have made more options available to decision makers at earlier stages.’

But in a statement to the BBC, Mr Selbie said the testing strategy was not PHE’s responsibility. 

‘PHE did not constrain or seek to control any laboratory either public, university or commercial from conducting testing,’ he said.  

Downing Street rejected the criticism over testing.

‘We set up the largest diagnostic testing industry in British history from scratch in a matter of weeks,’ the PM’s spokesman said.  

‘The PM is hugely grateful for the hard work and expertise of the UK’s world-leading scientists,’ the spokesman said.  

No10 also disowned Cabinet minister Therese Coffey after she blamed government blunders on coronavirus testing and care homes on ‘wrong’ science advice.  

Pushed on whether the government had made mistakes, Ms Coffey said ministers could ‘only make judgements and decisions based on the information and advice that we have at the time’. 

‘If the science advice at the time was wrong I am not surprised people think we made the wrong decision,’ she said. 

Asked about Ms Coffey’s intervention, the spokesman pointedly said ‘ministers make decisions, scientists advise’. 

The Science committee identified concerns over the transparency of its Sage (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergency) membership amid concerns political interference could affect the guidance.

The report, based on evidence sessions with experts including Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, and Professor Chris Whitty, chief medical officer for England, found the approach to dealing with asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19 was ‘unclear’.

Separately, a care home chief blamed delayed advice and testing during a ‘critical’ period for having spread coronavirus throughout homes.

Barchester Healthcare chief executive Dr Pete Calveley, who said around two thirds of his homes have had Covid-19 cases, told the BBC yesterday: ‘We’ve had several weeks where their first reaction was to protect the NHS, where they wanted to discharge a lot of clients from hospital to make sure there was capacity for what they anticipated was a surcharge.

‘And that meant a lot of people being discharged from care homes rather quickly who hadn’t been tested and often we’ve seen where we’ve been doing large testing of care homes where asymptomatic staff, and particularly residents, are actually positive and therefore are freely moving through the home are infecting other residents and staff without anybody knowing about it until too late.’

Dr Calveley said there was a ‘critical’ period of up to four weeks before testing was available and advice was issued for staff to wear professional masks and isolation for new admissions.

‘None of that advice came out until it was probably too late,’ he said.

One former minister told the Telegraph the government’s handling of the crisis was reminiscent of the famous Morecambe and Wise sketch featuring André Previn, the pianist and composer.

The MP said: ‘It’s like when Previn turns to Eric and says: ‘You’re not playing the right notes’ and Eric grabs him by the lapels and replies: ‘I am playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order’. Everything has been the wrong way round.’

On the plan for a 14-day quarantine period on arrivals to the UK, they added: ‘That should have happened at the beginning of the crisis, not at the end.’

Ms Coffey defended the Government’s coronavirus testing record as having improved from a ‘standing start’.

Responding to the Commons Science and Technology Committee’s criticism, she told BBC Breakfast: ‘We had a small amount of capacity at the very start, it was solely based on Public Health England’s capability of being able to have about 2,000 tests a day.

‘We had little capacity early on, I recognise that, we have got a lot of capacity now.

‘I think from pretty much a standing start, roughly in about mid-February I think it was, to get to a capacity and actual tests being done of 100,000 within about six weeks, I think is pretty full-on and actually I think something we can look on with pride.’