Covid-19 has exposed and exacerbated the failings of a precarious, underfunded, privatized social care sector. Privatization has created a social care system that delivers unsatisfactory care by undertrained and badly treated workers. The pandemic has showed up the false economy of years of neglect, which has taken a huge toll on the lives and wellbeing of those the care system should be protecting.

The shocking number of deaths in care homes has highlighted key failures in the government's approach to managing the pandemic. Not only was it generally unprepared, callously dismissive of the interests of the most vulnerable and committed to an unwarranted belief in the ability of the private sector to prepare for and respond to risks. The government also misused the public sector, by both giving out large contracts to private sector firms instead of using local public health services and fixating on the popular institution of the NHS rather than the public good the NHS is designed to serve.

Thus, protecting and strengthening social care services were given far lower priority than protecting the NHS – hence the fateful discharging of untested patients to care homes ill equipped either to care for them or to protect their other residents. Reserving testing and personal protective equipment for the NHS meant that those both using and providing social care were unprotected, consequently suffering unnecessarily high death rates. These attempts to “save the NHS” may have stopped the institution from going under, but only by sacrificing the health and lives it was set up to protect.

The social care system that entered the pandemic was underfunded, understaffed, undervalued and at risk of collapse. Any response to Covid-19 – however fast or comprehensive – would have needed to contend with this legacy of political neglect. When it comes to rebuilding the economy, it will be important to learn from the current crisis and commit to genuine reform. It should now be clear to everybody that an economic and social system is only as good as the quality of care that it provides.