The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has rejected Matt Hancock's claim that the government threw a "protective ring" around care homes from the start of the pandemic, finding in a report published on Tuesday that the assertion was "unfounded".
The report, the sixth of 10 from the Inquiry chaired by Baroness Hallett, was published on 20 October. It concludes that care homes "received insufficient protection at the time they most needed it" and that the UK government and devolved administrations knew before the pandemic how vulnerable residents were to respiratory viruses.
The finding goes to the heart of the former Health Secretary's defence of his record. More than 43,000 deaths involving Covid-19 were recorded in care homes between March 2020 and July 2022, according to the report, which describes the virus as the second leading cause of death in care homes over that period.
Hancock made the claim at a Downing Street press briefing on 15 May 2020. "Right from the start, it's been clear that this horrible virus affects older people most," he said, as quoted in the report. "So right from the start, we've tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes."
The Inquiry found that his choice of words did not reflect what was happening, according to LBC's account of the report. Hancock declined to comment on the findings when approached by the PA news agency.
Baroness Hallett said the government's attention in the first weeks of the crisis lay elsewhere. "Quite the opposite was true. During the crucial weeks of March and early April 2020, the overriding focus of the UK government and devolved administrations was on protecting hospitals," she said.
"The adult social care sector as a whole appeared to be something of an afterthought, where the mantra of 'protecting the NHS' sometimes came at the expense of the users and providers of care," she said.
The report identifies the policy of discharging hospital patients into care homes without advice to isolate them as a central failure. Baroness Hallett described the absence of such advice as a "significant omission", the Guardian reported.
"Care homes received insufficient protection at the time they most needed it. These failures created environments in care settings in which the virus could spread like wildfire," she said.
The report also records that care staff improvised protective equipment from festival ponchos, painters' overalls and bin bags, and that some were not paid in full while sick or self-isolating. It makes eight recommendations, according to LBC and Insider Paper, including better pandemic planning, improved provision for separating residents and financial support for social care staff who need to isolate.
Hancock defended the discharge policy when he gave evidence to the Inquiry's care sector hearings in 2025, calling it "the least-worst decision". "Nobody has yet provided me with an alternative that was available at the time that would have saved more lives," he told the Inquiry. He described the policy as an "incredibly contentious issue".
He had told an earlier module in 2023 that the protective ring had not been an unbroken one.
Bereaved families have gone further than the Inquiry in their characterisation of his words. Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK called the claim a "cruel lie". Jean Adamson, whose father Aldrick Adamson died after catching Covid in his care home, said the report was "a devastating account of one of the darkest episodes in our country's history".
Nicola Brook, a solicitor at Broudie Jackson Canter, which represents more than 7,000 families in the group, was critical of the report itself, calling it a "superficial damp squib".
The report arrives after a sequence of controversies that ended Hancock's ministerial and parliamentary career. In February 2021 the High Court ruled he had acted unlawfully by failing to publish details of PPE contracts within the 30 days required by law. The ruling concerned the timing of publication, not the contracts themselves.
He resigned as Health Secretary in June 2021 after The Sun published CCTV stills, recorded on 6 May that year, of him embracing his aide Gina Coladangelo in breach of the social distancing guidance his department had set. He later told the Inquiry he had resigned to take accountability for that failure.
In November 2022 the Conservative Party suspended the whip from him after he agreed to appear on ITV's I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here. The following year more than 100,000 of his WhatsApp messages were leaked to the Daily Telegraph by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, and the Inquiry was later shown an April 2020 message from his media adviser Jamie Njoku-Goodwin warning of "front pages demanding why we weren't testing people in care homes".
Rhun ap Iorwerth, the First Minister of Wales, said in a written statement on Tuesday that the Welsh Government would consider the findings and recommendations carefully. The UK government has said it will consider the findings and recommendations carefully and respond in due course.
The Inquiry's next report, on test, trace and isolate, is due on 19 November. The remaining three are scheduled for the first half of 2027.
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