Government broke law by failing care home residents who died of Covid, High Court rules

The government broke the law by failing to protect more than 20,000 elderly or disabled care home residents who died of Covid throughout the pandemic, the High Court has ruled.

The case was brought forward by Dr. Cathy Gardener and Fay Harris, whose fathers both died in their care homes after testing positive for Covid.

In a ruling today, Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Garnham concluded that policies contained in documents released in March and early April 2020 were unlawful because they failed to take into account the risk to elderly and vulnerable residents from non-symptomatic transmission of the virus, as per Sky News.

They explained that, despite there being ‘growing awareness’ of the risk of asymptomatic transmission throughout March 2020, no evidence was found that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock addressed the issue of the risk to care home residents of such transmission.

The judges said in their ruling: “In our judgment, this was not a binary question – a choice between on the one hand doing nothing at all, and on the other hand requiring all newly admitted residents to be quarantined.

“The document could, for example, have said that where an asymptomatic patient, other than one who has tested negative, is admitted to a care home, he or she should, so far as practicable, be kept apart from other residents for up to fourteen days.

“The drafters of the documents of March 17th and April 2nd simply failed to take into account the highly relevant consideration of the risk to elderly and vulnerable residents from asymptomatic transmission.”

Matt Hancock’s spokesperson has addressed the ruling, saying the High Court found he acted reasonably but Public Health England ‘failed to tell ministers what they knew about asymptomatic transmission’ of Covid.

They also said ‘Mr Hancock has frequently stated how he wished this had been brought to his attention earlier’.

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Lawyers representing Health Secretary Sajid Javid, NHS England and Public Health England, meanwhile, had fought the claim the government acted unlawfully by failing to protect care homes.

Dr. Gardner’s father died at the age of eighty-eight in a care home in Bicester, Oxfordshire, in April 2020.

She said in a statement after the ruling: “My father, along with tens of thousands of other elderly and vulnerable people, tragically died in care homes in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I believed all along that my father and other residents of care homes were neglected and let down by the government.”