MATT Hancock was grilled on if he told Downing Street that people leaving hospital would be tested before they returned to care homes during a car crash press briefing.
The Health Secretary had hoped the topic of his presser would be the rate at which the new April-02 variant of the virus is spreading through the UK, but the questions quickly turned to whether or not he had been truthful during a key policy decision at the height of the pandemic.
There have been 36,275 deaths involving Covid in UK care homes since the beginning of the pandemic.
During Dominic Cummings marathon evidence session to MPs yesterday, he claimed that Hancock had told him and the Prime Minister that those being moved from hospitals to care homes would be tested before they were moved.
READ MORE: Boris Johnson denies government failings led to extra deaths
However, Cummings went on to say that he and the PM later discovered that this hadn’t happened at all and journalists at the briefing were quick to probe Hancock on the allegations, repeatedly.
Hancock claimed that he had to “build capacity” in the testing system first and that his “recollection” of events was slightly different from the former aide to the PM.
Taking the first question, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg asked: “Can you still stand there today and say it’s true that you protected care homes from the start? And did you or did you not tell Downing Street that people leaving hospitals would be tested before they went back to care homes?”
Hancock said: “We worked as hard as we could to protect people who live in care homes, and ofcourse those who live in care homes are some of the most vulnerable to this disease because by its nature it attacks and has more of an impact on older people.
“When it comes to the testing of people as they left hospital and went into care homes, we committed to building the testing capacity to allow that to happen.
“Of course it then takes time to build testing capacity, in fact one of the critical things we did was set the 100,000 target back then to make sure we built that testing capacity and it was very effective in doing so and then we were able to introduce the policy of testing everybody going into care homes, but we could only do that once we have the testing capacity which I had to build.”
READ MORE: Dominic Cummings criticises Nicola Sturgeon over Covid briefings
Similar questions were then asked by ITV, SKY, the Mirror and the Times, which Hancock dodged and continually referred to testing capacity.
SKY’s Beth Rigby asked: “So just to be clear, did you make the statement in March that they would be tested before going to care homes and that didn’t turn out to be true because you didn’t have the testing system in place, is that what really happened?”
Hancock said: “No, there will be time when we go back over all of this in great detail but my recollection of events is that I committed to delivering that testing for people going from hospital into care homes when we could do it.
“I then went away and built the testing capacity for all sorts of uses including this one and then delivered on the commitment I made, and that’s a normal way of how you get things done in government. You work out what needs done, you commit to making it happen, you go away and deliver on that commitment and then you can put the policy in place.”
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