LABOUR raised concerns about deaths in care homes during the Covid pandemic but got “the brush off”, according to the party’s Shadow Treasury Chief Secretary.

Pat McFadden was commenting on reports in The Daily Telegraph which claim that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock ignored expert advice about testing in care homes.

He told GB News: “Well, it’s important to remember that even in the early days of the pandemic, people knew that care homes were very vulnerable as there were a lot of frail and elderly people in there.

“My Labour colleague Peter Kyle, for example, raised as early as March 2020 protection for care homes and he was given the brush off at the time.

“We were told that there was a protective ring around care homes but if this morning’s story in The Daily Telegraph is true, it would suggest there was a very big hole in that protective ring.

“That story suggests that even though the Chief Medical Officer said everyone going into care homes should be tested, we were told that the government was following the science

“That didn’t happen, which led to a pretty big gap in the defences, and that is particularly serious, given what we knew, even in the very early days of the pandemic, about the vulnerability of elderly people and residents of care homes.”

Asked about Labour’s publication today of 100 examples of wasteful government spending, he said: “I’ve been in politics a long time and throughout that time, the Conservative Party has cloaked itself in the rhetoric of sound management of money, careful stewardship of the public finances and so on.

“And what we’ve published today is quite a cautious list. Actually, we haven’t included things like benefit fraud, or tax fraud and things like that.

“We’ve just talked about specific government spending and then we found 100 examples ranging from dodgy PPE deals to bad Ministry of Defence procurement to preparations over and over again for a no deal Brexit that never happened, to the ludicrous example of Rishi Sunak spending a million pounds on focus groups about himself.

“And it all adds up to a substantial amount of money. And it matters because we’re publishing this just before taxes go up for people and energy bills go up.”