Billions pledged to tackle coronavirus in care homes failing to reach frontline, government warned

Boris Johnson's promise of 200,000 Covid tests a day is not adequate, says chief executive of major care home chain

Billions of pounds committed by government to tacking coronavirus in care homes is not getting through to the frontline, the boss of one of the country’s biggest chains has warned.

And Jeremy Richardson, chief executive of Four Seasons Health Care, said that Boris Johnson’s plan for 200,000 Covid-19 tests a day were “not adequate” to deal with the epidemic in care homes for the elderly.

Mr Richardson dismissed as “disingenuous” health secretary Matt Hancock’s claim that the government had “thrown a protective ring around care homes” from the start of the outbreak, saying that official attention turned to the sector only after dealing with initial concerns about the NHS being overwhelmed.

“That clearly wasn’t the case,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today. “The initial focus was on ensuring that there was capacity in the NHS, making sure the NHS was safe and secure. Once that had become apparent, then I think attention turned to the community and care homes as part of the community.”

Central government has provided an additional £3.2 billion for care homes during the coronavirus outbreak, and last week announced a further £600 million for infection control.

But Mr Richardson said much of the cash had been swallowed up in local council bank accounts.

“It’s not getting through to the frontline,” he said. “What’s happening is that the government is giving that money to local authorities. Local authorities are ring-fencing it for social care, which is what they are required to do. But when the scale of collective overdrafts in local authorities is in excess of £10 billion, that £3.2 billion can be ring-fenced for social care and all it is doing is reducing the size of collective overdrafts.

“What we need as frontline providers is for the money to get through to us. Once you filter it through local authorities it gets entangled in bureaucracy and it’s not getting through to the people who need it.

“I don’t see any reason why this money can’t be managed centrally. There is a time and a place for local democracy, of course, but we are in the middle of a crisis and in a crisis you need to start centralising your command and control, otherwise everything becomes very inefficient.”

Four Seasons, which looks after around 10,000 people in 250 homes around the UK, has experienced death rates among residents up to three times the usual weekly average of 80 during April, said Mr Richardson. Deaths peaked in the second week of last month at 217 and have since dropped to 134 last week, with a total of around 470 excess deaths over the course of the outbreak so far.

Ministers’ promise of tests for all care home residents and staff by early June was “not helpful” to operators who need a rolling programme of regular checks rather than one-off “single point tests” to prevent the disease flaring up.

“We need to see testing rolled out on a regular basis,” said Mr Richardson. “There are 1.4 million people working in social care and I think all those people need to be tested every week.

“So the 200,000 tests a day that the government has announced ought to be deployed on that basis only into social care. But of course you have got to test the rest of the country as well, so the government needs to scale up testing dramatically because at the moment the testing isn’t adequate.

“To simply do a single point test? One would question whether that is of benefit to us as the operators or to the government for their statistics.”