Ruth Davidson calls for inquiry into Scotland's Covid-19 care home crisis

The former leader of the Scottish Conservatives and Edinburgh Central MSP was speaking on Good Morning Britain.

Ruth Davidson has called for a UK-wide inquiry into the Covid-19 crisis

Ruth Davidson has called for an inquiry into the care home crisis in Scotland caused by Covid-19.

She also called for a UK-wide inquiry into the handling of the coronavirus pandemic and said there would be “so many lessons that we have to learn”.

Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives and current Edinburgh Central MSP, said the Scottish Government had made the decision to put patients in care homes without testing.

She also repeated the claim that Scotland’s care home death rate is double that of England’s, however the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has argued that is due to under-reporting of figures in England.

Statistics published on May 18 showed that the percentage of care homes with an outbreak of Covid-19 is marginally higher in Scotland than in England at 41 and 38 per cent respectively.

Ms Davidson said: “I think that whatever inquiries we have out of the back of this, there's going to be so many lessons that we have to learn.

“For example you're talking about the situation in England where some people were put into care homes without having tested negative first before they were discharged from hospital, we've had the same thing in Scotland, but we've had it to a greater degree.

“We had the Scottish government actively buying beds in advance in care homes, spending money, telling care for operators ‘we want to empty our hospitals and we're going to do it without testing or having a negative test back of the people that we are putting in there’.

“So in terms of the agency of government; actually physically making the decision to put people that may or may not be infected into an enclosed environment of incredibly vulnerable people and like I say our care home death rate in Scotland is more than double out of England.

She added: “I think what I think there needs to be inquiry in each part of the UK because it's health and health is devolved; Wales is doing it differently, Scotland's doing it differently, England's doing it differently.

“But I think we also need to have a much broader inquiry across the whole of the United Kingdom of what do we need to learn if this, God help us, comes back again or something like it.”