We can probably agree that Care Minister Helen Whately endured a torrid time defending the Government’s handling of COVID-19 while the pandemic was raging. Her halting parliamentary and media performances prompted often cruel sarcasm and derision.
But Whately has since noticeably upped her presentational game and she also emerges with credit from the mass leak to the Daily Telegraph of WhatsApp messages from and to her former boss, Matt Hancock. Indeed, she is one of the few people to do so.
We now know that Whately was forced to defend in public a number of policies with which she did not agree. In private, she was pressing fruitlessly for testing of all care home residents and staff, irrespective of any symptoms; she was questioning the rushed discharge of hospital patients to care homes to free up capacity; she was protesting vehemently about inadequate and delayed supplies of PPE to social care settings; and she was pressing repeatedly for the selective loosening of blanket visiting restrictions imposed on care homes. Small wonder that her appearances at the Commons despatch box and on TV and radio were often less than convincing.
For better or worse, and setting aside the ethics of the parties involved, the leak of the cache of more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages has shone a welcome light on progress of the COVID-19 inquiry. Before the Telegraph first splashed its (no doubt) expensively procured treasure on 1st March, the inquiry was lumbering along in its quiet way and attracting little mainstream attention.
In truth, it is still in the foothills of its mammoth task. But three years on from the first lockdown, with the care sector still counting its 45,000-plus deaths from COVID-19, or more accurately ‘involving’ the virus, it’s timely to ask how and when social care will have its experiences and issues addressed.
So far the inquiry, chaired by former judge Baroness Hallett, has begun three modules: one on resilience and preparedness for the pandemic; a second on decision-making in central Government; and a third on the pandemic’s impact on healthcare systems. The parameters of the latter have been set quite tightly around healthcare to the exclusion of other forms of care and support. Overall, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of scope yet for social care issues to be raised.
We shall see how far module one – resilence and preparedeness – extends to social care when public hearings begin in June. But otherwise the sector’s hopes rest on the definition of further modules, yet to be announced but expected to include PPE and wider procurement, testing and tracing and indeed something about the sector itself.
Perhaps this should come as no surprise. Social care is well accustomed to being an afterthought – which is of course why its pandemic experience was so traumatic and so deadly.
An exchange from the WhatsApp leaks makes the point perfectly. On 18th April 2020, Whately told Hancock at 6pm that new data showed there had been 10,000 excess deaths of people in care homes or receiving homecare in the previous six weeks. She asked for an urgent meeting. At just before 10pm Hancock replied: ‘Aargh sorry – just got this – tmrw.’
For social care, it always seems a case of help tomorrow.