Government failures in care settings created an environment that allowed Covid to spread like wildfire, an official inquiry has said.

The sixth report from the Covid inquiry said the care sector appeared to be “something of an afterthought” in the early stages of the pandemic and there was no “protective ring” put around homes as claimed by ministers at the time.

There were more than 43,000 recorded deaths involving Covid in care homes between March 2020 and July 2022.

The 287-page report also highlighted shortages of PPE for carers and criticised the way hospital patients were discharged into care homes.

It said limits on visits caused enormous harm to residents and their loved ones, though it blamed this on care homes themselves.

Around 1.5 million adults were either living in care homes or receiving support in their own homes when Covid hit.

Action to protect them came too late, causing devastating consequences, the inquiry said.

Chair Baroness Hallet said a lack of testing, PPE and pre-pandemic planning combined with policy decisions early on “created an environment in which the virus could spread like wildfire”.

“At the critical early stages of the pandemic, not enough was done to protect those living and working in care homes,” she said.

“The overriding focus of the UK government and devolved administrations was on protecting hospitals.”

At the start of the pandemic, the then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the government had placed a protective ring around care homes.

But the report said that this claim was unfounded.

It also found:

Jean Adamson, of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said: “Today’s report is a devastating account of one of the darkest episodes in our country’s history.

“It shows that the government knew the care sector was extremely vulnerable to a pandemic and yet did nothing. Failing to act until it was too late.”

Caroline, Abrahams, the charity director at Age UK, said the report was “devastating”.

“When Covid took off, people using social care and the staff and unpaid carers providing it were left totally exposed.”

She added it also demonstrated how important the overhaul of social care promised by Andy Burnham when he became prime minister was.

“If a national care service had already been in place… the various disasters that befell social care during the pandemic would have been lessened and some might have been avoided altogether.”

Meanwhile, Natalie Grayson, from the GMB union, said care workers were “left vulnerable and terribly exposed” during the pandemic which saw “care homes turned into morgues”.

“That cannot be allowed to happen again,” she added.

Nadra Ahmed, co-chair of the National Care Association, which represents care providers in England described the findings as “really upsetting”, adding that the social care workforce has “never fully recovered” from the pandemic.

She said we need to “start thinking about social care in a more constructive way” and the mantra that “we all had to protect the NHS” appears to have come at the cost of “some care home residents’ lives”.

Health Secretary Yvette Cooper said the government would provide a “full response” to the report’s recommendations “in due course”.

Speaking in the Commons, Cooper said she agreed that social care had been “undervalued and under-recognised” for too long.

“My thoughts are with all those who lost loved ones in the pandemic, and especially those who endured the immense distress and harm of visiting restrictions in care homes, which meant they could not be with loved ones even as they died,” she added.