No-one in charge on adult social care, review leader to warn

Résumé détaillé

Baroness Louise Casey is leading a commission into reform of the sector.

Governments have been “asleep at the wheel” on social care, the leader of a review into reform of the sector is expected to say as new research concludes it is a “fundamentally fragmented system” with no-one in charge overall.

Baroness Louise Casey is also set to brand failings in the pandemic which saw Covid-19 “spread like wildfire” in care settings where many older people died without family at their bedsides as “a national shame”.

A report by the UK Covid-19 Inquiry last month stated that the care sector was “an afterthought” and rubbished then-health secretary Matt Hancock’s claim made in May 2020 about a so-called protective ring around care homes at the start of the pandemic as “unfounded”.

Inquiry chairwoman Baroness Heather Hallett said: “Quite the opposite was true.”

Her report found that vulnerable care home residents were left with “insufficient protection” as patients were discharged from hospitals without knowing if they had the virus and that the mantra of protecting the NHS “sometimes came at the expense of the users and providers of care”, with care homes “becoming prisons” for some amid visiting bans and many residents feeling “abandoned”.

Baroness Casey, in a speech to a gathering of social care leaders in Liverpool on Wednesday, will call for “a new settlement for care”.

Speaking at the National Children and Adult Services Conference (NCASC), she is expected to say: “The Covid-19 Inquiry took apart the argument that a ‘protective ring’ had been thrown around care homes during the pandemic.

“Many old people died without their loved ones by their side. Many care workers left their jobs after what they had seen.

“It is a national shame that this was allowed to happen. It should never happen again.

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