It was a horrific catastrophe waiting to happen, and its origins lie way back. The Office for National Statistics estimates that nearly 30,000 more care home residents in England and Wales died between 2 March and 12 June this year than during the same period in 2019.

It was a horrific catastrophe waiting to happen, and its origins lie way back. The Office for National Statistics estimates that nearly 30,000 more care home residents in England and Wales died between 2 March and 12 June this year than during the same period in 2019. In two thirds of these cases the cause of death was attributed to Covid-19, and many of the “non-Covid” deaths involved undiagnosed coronavirus or were collateral damage due to the non-availability of life-saving treatment for other conditions.

How this appalling situation came about is a deeply political story. The care home system itself was collateral damage in the long-running ideological warfare over the relative merits of public and private provision of essential services. It was another victim of the policy of “shrinking the state” that was aggressively pursued under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher.

There has to be a reckoning. It appears, for instance, that serious misjudgments were made by administrators, no doubt in ignorance of the possible consequences. And they were dealing with a sector of the welfare system which itself needed to be receiving intensive care, instead of the benign neglect – now looking not so benign – that has been the order of the day under successive governments.

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