A former social care minister warned Matt Hancock that visitor bans in care homes during the Covid pandemic were ‘inhumane’, according to leaked WhatsApp messages.
Helen Whately expressed her opposition to the strict visitor rules in care homes to the then Minister of Health in October 2020.
She pushed against rules preventing “men from seeing their wives” as large parts of England moved to Tier One restrictions, The Telegraph reports.
She continued to press Hancock on the cause of the elderly after the rest of England went into lockdown for a second time in November that year, advising that there was a risk that many vulnerable people would ‘just give up’.
Restrictions on visitors in care homes were not lifted until July 2021, over a year after the country first became caught up in Covid restrictions.
Helen Whately expressed her opposition to the strict visitor rules in care homes to the then Minister of Health in October 2020
The reports show that Health Secretary Matt Hancock advised against sudden changes to visiting rules as the government sought to improve its monthly targets
To curb the spread of the coronavirus, care homes were closed to outsiders in March 2020, although it took a week for the visitor ban to be incorporated into official guidelines.
As a result, many elderly and frail residents have endured months without their loved ones, including spouses.
Ms Whately approached Hancock with her visitor curb concerns in a WhatsApp message dated 12 October 2021.
She wrote: ‘I hear there is pressure to ban visits to care homes in both phase 2 and phase 3. Can you help? I’m really against that.
“Where care homes have Covid-safe visitors, we should allow it. It is inhumane to prevent men from seeing their wives because they live in nursing homes for months on end.’
A few days after the messages were sent, new Tier One restrictions – the most relaxed of the four tiers – were introduced across much of England. The rule meant that residents of care homes could only have two regular visitors.
Residents of care homes living in higher elevations were not allowed to interact with visitors except in extreme or end-of-life scenarios.
Most care home restrictions not lifted until July 2021, over a year after the first lockdown began
Restrictions were later leveled across England on November 5, 2020, when the second lockdown began.
In subsequent messages, Ms Whately urged the government to review its visitor policy, with a ‘risk of lives lost from old people giving up as much as Covid’.
In response, Mr Hancock advised against making sudden changes as the government sought to improve its targets for the end of the month, adding: ‘Yes, visiting, but only after a few weeks.’
Other leaked reports showed that Mr Hancock rejected the Chief Medical Officer’s call for all residents who went to UK care homes at the start of the pandemic to be tested for Covid.
Sir Chris Whitty told him there should be Covid testing for ‘all those going into care homes’ – one of 1,000 text and WhatsApp messages leaked by a former journalist who was the ghostwriter of Mr Hancock’s diaries .
But Mr Hancock’s WhatsApp messages revealed he was not following the guidelines, instead telling advisers it is ‘muddying the waters’.
The leaked texts also include exchanges between the former Health Secretary and then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who revealed he was “quiet crackers” about the UK’s shortage of test kits.
On the morning of June 4, 2020, Mr Johnson sent a message saying: ‘It’s all about testing. That is our Achilles heel. We cannot provide a sensible border policy or adequate track and trace because we cannot test enough.
Sir Chris Whitty (left) told then health secretary Matt Hancock (right) there should be testing for ‘all who go into care homes’, but this guidance was rejected, leaked reports show
“Did we go to the Germans for those kits Angela Merkel offered? What’s wrong with us as a country that we can’t fix this?’
In two follow-up messages, Mr. Johnson said Mr. Hancock’s department had “months and months” to resolve the issue, before adding: “I’m going to quietly crack down on this.”
Mr Hancock replied, ‘Don’t go crackers. We have enough testing capacity to do this. We now have the largest testing capacity in Europe.
“The problem is the false negatives – so the medics are against releasing self-isolation (either for quarantine or T&T) with a negative (sic) test. No one in the world comes out of quarantine with a negative test.
“I went back to CMO and pushed this. I’ll send you the note he sent me.’
The government has introduced mandatory testing for people entering care homes from hospital, but not from the community.
It comes as Mr Hancock was accused of ‘laying social care on the altar to be slaughtered’ after 20,000 elderly residents in homes died from Covid in the first wave.
Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson, then Health Secretary and Prime Minister, pictured visiting Bassetlaw District General Hospital on Nov. 22, 2019
The leaked texts also include exchanges between the former Health Secretary and then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who revealed he was “quiet crackers” about the UK’s shortage of test kits.
In his pandemic diaries, serialized by the Daily Mail last year, Mr Hancock claimed it was not to blame that hospital discharges were to blame, but instead pointed the finger at ‘infections being brought in from the wider community, mainly through staff’.
A set of 100,000 text and WhatsApp messages has been leaked to the Daily Telegraph by former journalist Isabel Oakeshott, the ghost writer of Mr Hancock’s diaries.
Ms Oakeshott, who described lockdowns as an ‘unmitigated disaster’, said she released the messages because it would be ‘many years’ before the official Covid investigation ends, which she claimed could be a ‘colossal whitewash’.
“That’s why I’ve decided to release this sensational cache of private communications — because we absolutely can’t wait any longer for answers,” she said.
The reports show how the politician sent out tens of thousands of Covid tests to meet his daily target of 100,000, even though he knew many wouldn’t get used to it, the Telegraph reported.
