The Health Secretary Matt Hancock has insisted that he promised the Prime Minister and his former chief aide Dominic Cummings only that all elderly and vulnerable patients would be tested for Covid on discharge to a care home when there was adequate testing capacity, and not with immediate effect.
This is Hancock’s defence against Cummings’s charge that the Health Secretary lied to him and the PM when promising to test patients prior to them going to a care home.
But I understand Cummings has documentary evidence that as late as May last year he and the PM feared they had been misled by Hancock about how he would protect the elderly in care homes, and that he was guilty of ‘negligence’.
Cummings says Hancock made an unconditional promise not to send potentially infected patients into care homes.
A source says there was a fear in No. 10 that Hancock’s ‘negligence’ had ‘killed people in care homes’
The problem for Hancock is – I understand – that Dominic Cummings has documents showing Matt Hancock was summoned by the Prime Minister’s office to 10 Downing Street on 3 May, for a meeting on 4 May, to explain whether he had misled Cummings, the PM and the then-cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill on testing patients before discharging them into care homes and also about further testing of residents and staff in care homes.
A source says there was a fear in Downing Street that Mr Hancock’s ‘negligence’ had ‘killed people in care homes’ (a charge which the Department of Health has denied).
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