Covid-19: Government Handling and Preparedness

Barbara Keeley Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I am absolutely delighted my hon. Friend has had his first jab; I did not know he was old enough yet. It is very important that you take decisions in government based on the information that you have at the time. Of course, you can go and assess things based on information you have afterwards, but you can only take decisions on the information that you have, and that is why an unprecedented crisis like this leads to unprecedented challenges, and what you have to do is tackle those challenges as best you possibly can.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]]

At the start of this pandemic, covid-19 was seeded into care homes by a discharge policy that required care homes to take asymptomatic patients. A letter from Kent and Medway CCG to care providers dated 26 March 2020 made it clear that they were asked to take such patients whether they had been tested or not. Yesterday, the joint Select Committee inquiry heard that the Prime Minister was told by the Secretary of State that testing would be in place for these patients. I am asking quite specifically: did he know that the discharge process did not require testing, and did he sign off this policy, which led to thousands of avoidable deaths of vulnerable people and many deaths of care staff?

[Matt Hancock]

I have answered this question many times, and the challenge is that we had to build the testing capacity. At that time, of course I was focused on protecting people in care homes and in building that testing capacity, so that we had the daily tests to be able to ensure that availability was more widespread. That is at the heart of the importance of the then 100,000 target, and we are now up to a position where we have millions of tests available per day.