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So can you just start by saying your name and what your current job title is?

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My name is Mary Daly and I am a professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Oxford.

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So I'm interested in how you got to be where you are now.

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But if you could quite briefly give me the main headlines in your career so far, how you got interested in social policy and particularly care.

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And then we'll talk a bit more about what the the issues are as a research area.

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So my original education, which was in Ireland, was as a social worker.

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My degree was what we called social administration, and I started there wanting to be a social worker.

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But quite quickly I realised actually through the degree I also did a master's in social sciences,

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I realised quite quickly I was more interested in research rather than in social work, and I think I was better at research than social work.

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And that led me then to research the field. So I've researched, I've worked in many different countries.

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I did another, I did my PhD at the European University Institute at Florence, and that was also in social sciences and sociology in particular.

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I've worked in a number of different countries in the fields. I'm interested in really family wellbeing, gender care, European Union, social policy,

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and I work very much from a comparative perspective, but mainly high income countries rather than the world at large.

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That's very, very helpful, very good background. So what would you say are the main questions that you were investigating up to?

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We will get to go with in a minute. But before that, in relation particularly to care of of young children and also of older people.

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So I very interested in questions around wellbeing and how we as a society can create the maximum well-being for the maximum number of people.

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And that leads me particularly perhaps to a concern with people or sectors of the population who may not be able to secure their own wellbeing.

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And it also leads me to an analysis of the state and the welfare state in particular.

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So the kinds of questions I suppose that I have considered most explicitly and consistently

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in my work is about the role of the state and how the state can contribute to wellbeing,

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but also how it sometimes detracts from wellbeing and how it is very much a site of contestation and a site of change over time.

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For me, care is a very widespread concept concept.

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Obviously we have the care of people who cannot take care of themselves, young children or perhaps fragile adults, fragile for different reasons.

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But I think it's a much broader principle.

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I think it's about how we as a society organise ourselves because I see that we all need care at various stages.

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I don't subscribe to a view of the world as consisting of independent people and dependent people.

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I think we're interdependent, so care is very much about the world meeting the wellbeing needs of everyone

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and of us not just caring for each other but caring about each other as well.

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And what are the main components of care, would you say?

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Well, actually there is quite some quite good academic literature that has really tried to think to to work this out.

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So there is, I suppose, the activities of providing for other people's needs, you know, doing the housework, cooking the meals,

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taking the children to school, spending time with people, older people or people of different generations who cannot do things for themselves.

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That's the kind of what's been called caring for.

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But then there is another tie or component which is caring about, and that's much more about how we relate to other people,

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what responsibility we take for other people, and also actually for our environment.

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So it's it's much broader than the actual task of caring.

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It's about an orientation that makes us take responsibility and share responsibility as well.

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And in the work that you've done,

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how much interaction is there between you and deliveries of care at either a regional and national or an international level?

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There is there's some interaction, I would say. I mean, working as I do on the welfare state,

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this leads me very much to social policy and to policymakers and to think tanks and international organisations that advise on policy,

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that devise policies. See that analysed policy critically.

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So I think I have quite a lot of influence and have done quite a lot of work

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with organisations that are funding research to improve a practice in general.

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I have a less work, I think,

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with decision makers themselves in governments because I have lived in different places and actually you need to have a stable,

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you need to work in places I think for 20 years or 30 years to actually have a network,

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a network of policymakers that you can talk to or that you can identify and who know and trust your work.

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I do have some networks, but it's probably not as engaged as some other people.

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I've worked a lot for the European Union. I've worked for the Council of Europe.

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I have worked for the ILO. When I say worked for,

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I mean done projects funded by them and been engaged in activities that they organise around policy learning or policy analysis.

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So I think at an international I've worked also for the UN, so at an international level I have good contacts,

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but there are probably these organisations you wouldn't say are policy makers per say.

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Then in terms of the deliverers of service, that varies about.

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But one of the activities that I've been involved in in Oxford is at my college Green Templeton College.

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I set up what I call a care initiative, which is what it says on the title, really to have conversations about care.

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I set this up ten years ago because I believe fundamentally we need to be talking about care.

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And actually we have quite a big mailing list and quite good we meet or I hold

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usually lectures or discussion sessions about six times a year and many people come,

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we have an email list, it's about 350 honoured and many of the people who come are local and they could be people

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who are themselves involved in care provision or who have an interest as well as academics.

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But many are care providers, care home owners, for example, or other care providers, or we have the County Council come coming on occasion as well.

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So that's my contact with them, I suppose, through my research as well,

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because I've done some work on care homes and we've had to have contact with care home owners or the service providers in that regard.

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So I have some contact with those. And when you work on policy, you always have a you always have to talk to people who deliver, really.

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So that always comes into my work. Okay, well, let's get to it.

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So can you remember when you first heard that there was something going on in China that looked a bit worrying and how

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soon it was when you realised that actually this was something that was going to be relevant to your area of interest?

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I think I probably heard Christmas 2019.

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I do keep abreast of, you know, the current affairs of news, and I think at that stage there was some stirrings about what was happening in China,

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but probably I didn't really realise the significance of it until January.

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And then I remember in February I got a cold, a very bad I had a very bad cough and I was really thinking maybe this is COVID.

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And I'm actually not unconvinced that it wasn't COVID because I had I couldn't get rid of my cough.

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It was the worst cough I ever had. It was for thought I had it for about three weeks.

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So that around that time period, I think, and of course academics started talking about it then to maybe not so much academics in this country,

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but certainly I have lost a lot of networks in Italy. And if you remember, it hit Italy terribly badly.

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And so some of my Italian friends were saying, or Italian colleagues, I should say,

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were saying there's something going on here in you know, in nursing homes and and deaths of are illness and deaths among older people.

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January, particularly February. And I think by late February, I knew there was something serious.

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And so how did you respond in the in the research sense and I know you've done various things,

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but let's let's take care homes to start with, because that was quite early on this move, to move people out of hospital into care homes.

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And and as time went on, it became clear that care homes were a potential site of of infection.

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Well, I felt we needed to have the information on what was happening.

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And so and I were also teaching on some of this.

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So we started in.

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Even in 2020, although it was early because if I recall correctly, our last class was sometimes in early March 2020 at the end of Hillary,

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the term which would have been early to mid-March, but we had actually started talking about it in in the class, in the class as well.

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What I felt the need for was to seek out information, as much information I could on what was happening.

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And I had been work that much actually, on care homes.

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So as I explained to my concern, my general interest is in care, broadly conceive and care of older people in particular.

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That's kind of my main interest. So I hadn't actually really done a lot of work in care homes, but I started to actually read and write.

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I may write my own thoughts on it, and that probably was the beginning of what I did.

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Of course, I had to be concerned about my students, some of whom also study care and, you know, take care of my students in that regard as well.

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And the general panic, I mean, there was a lot of panic among students.

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I didn't feel particularly panicked myself, as I recall.

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So I usually I ask questions about how you felt about it later on.

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But so how did you go about gathering information?

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Oh, well, I use the public. I found the newspapers actually extremely good, I must say, and they broke a lot of revelations about, if I recall,

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I read the first thing I read about care homes, people being released to care homes without tests from hospital.

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I think I read that in the media.

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I didn't actually read that in the government side, but certainly government sites, also the Department of Health and Care,

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looking at all their briefings, for example, watching the briefings on TV and that.

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So, I mean, my other work was going on. You know, I can't remember what I was working at at that time,

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but I certainly felt the need to be very cognisant of what was happening, particularly in regard as the care homes story unfolded.

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I then decided perhaps by March, that I actually needed to be really active on this and get as much as get as much information as I can.

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And then in May I decided I would myself present to the CARE initiative,

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which I mentioned earlier, and I think I made a big what I would think of a big presentation.

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It was online, of course, on the 21st of May, outlining my analysis of what, you know,

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what what was happening in care homes and much broader than just what was happening in care

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homes because I didn't see what was happening in care care homes as accidental or partly,

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you know, it wasn't apparent necessarily, you know, our care system contributed to it and how over time we've really disinvested in care,

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I think, and how we've allowed a very complicated structure and lack of our governance is weak, I think of care homes.

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So I wrote I gave the talk on the 21st of May, and then I actually and I had to do a lot of work coming up to it because,

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as I said, I wasn't just looking what happened in care homes. I was looking at the whole structure of the NHS, the historic,

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the history of social care in this country, and also the kind of decisions that had been taken.

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And then I published the I got very quick turnaround from the Journal.

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And in fact, when I published the article, what happened in Care Homes and Why?

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It was, I think, one of the most one of the it was in the top 3% of reviewed articles in the journal.

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It's faded now but initially it was yeah, that's very public.

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Yes. So in terms of what you were saying earlier about caring for and caring for and

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caring about what struck you at the time about how the pandemic showed up,

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inequalities in how we cared about each other?

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Yeah, I felt very strongly and I feel very strongly that we don't care really much as a society for people who we might say are weaker.

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I wouldn't necessarily use that. I'd be careful about how I use that word.

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But I, you know, the term I usually say is people who cannot take full care of themselves.

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I felt that again.

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So I don't think it was an accident. What happened? I think I'm not saying it was a deliberate either, but I think it reveals four really core things.

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This about our society. And one of them was that we don't actually care much about what happens to people who are in institutions and care homes,

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but also other institutions, because it didn't just happen in care homes.

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It happened also in our care homes for older people. It happened in most institutions.

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So that was what I what I felt about it.

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I felt really passionately about it, that this needed to be out there because it's hard to to remember back to March and April and May.

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It was so chaotic and 2020. But I felt that there was a real need to make a statement about it and to try and clarify exactly what happened.

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Even the timeline I used, I had to really put in a lot of work to get the timeline right.

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And I'm really happy that that's out there as a historical document.

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It's not, of course, a the new timeline, but so I felt the need very much to get information out there because I felt people people cared, I think.

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But I don't know if our institutions cared,

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although I will say I do think the media actually did a major job in revealing what was happening in care homes and keeping with it for a long time.

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So, you know, it's it's not easy to make generalisations and say that nobody cared.

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No. And I remember positive stories about a particular home where all the staff

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agreed to be shut in with the residents because so that they weren't coming in,

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going in, risking bringing in. Absolutely. Absolutely.

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And there was right across the media, it wasn't in one particular set of newspapers or whatever I'm thinking of the newspapers in particularly,

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but I think the television stations do the same really well.

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And you told me earlier that another of your projects was to look at care for children.

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Yes, I am more international. Yes. I'm very interested in the.

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So one of the kind of fields of studies I'm interested in is family or families.

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And I try to, I suppose, in my work,

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move away from a kind of a simplistic understanding of the family as a singular type with a mother or a father and a number of children.

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And I come out of a gender background.

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And so I suppose when you think about inequalities within families or when you work on gender,

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you think of inequalities within families, power, inequalities and so forth.

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And I've done a lot of work on that, looking at a lot of comparative work across countries and not establishing exactly

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where the inequalities come from and how they're reinforced by by the state,

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by the welfare state policies in particular. And that led me to think about children and age related inequalities within households and to start to,

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in a way decompose or disaggregate family from child related perspective.

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And children are actually in some ways, it's a big parallel between children and other people who need care for or can't fully care for themselves.

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Their voices are often silenced. And so that's where my interest, I think, in children comes from and in care.

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And and that's that was another thing I started quite early on as well, trying to document what was happening for families.

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What kind of supports were families being given in countries, and were any of these supports being directed to children as against parents?

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And there isn't necessarily an opposition between children and parents,

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but there is a tendency or there is a theme in the literature that says we have to see children independently of parents as well.

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So that was one of the one of the concerns I had.

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And in relation to that, in this department, we put we got a small grant from the John Fell fund, I believe,

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of the university to some colleagues and I to look at trackers that were tracking social policy and we wanted to

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put together a resource for all the trackers that were available and because everywhere seemed to have a tracker,

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but it was very hard to know what information was in particular trackers, you had to go to the trackers themselves.

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So I, together with colleagues, I didn't actually lead on that.

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I think we put together what we call a super tracker, which was tracking the trackers.

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And I in putting that together. It was a few months work or I think we probably worked on that in mid 2020.

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I realised very quickly there was nothing on children, there was nothing on families.

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It was all about employment, It was all about jobs. It was all about health and that there was nothing on families.

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So I started with some two of my Ph.D. students to put together.

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We we got some money here from the department, mainly to start putting together what what countries were doing.

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When countries introduce parental leave, do they pay parents to care for children at home?

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Do they provide food, substitute food? When schools are closed?

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Did they provide additional income?

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Do they provide learning support? When did they give the vaccination to children as against giving it to adults?

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So the result is we then subsequently got some funding from the UNICEF Office of Research in Florence,

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and we've put together a database of 40 countries and it goes I mean,

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we have information that goes beyond 2020, but most of the information relates to nine months of 20, 20, ten months in the case.

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We have Japan and South Korea in there from Asia.

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But most of the information is over nine months for 40 countries, mainly high income countries, European Union and all OECD countries in the main.

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So that will be launched quite soon. Mm hmm. And so that was looking at policies.

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Policies, Yes.

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So let's start with I immediately start thinking about outcomes, but we're talking about the policies and how much a wider range would you say?

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Obviously, you've got so many different components, so you've got education, health, income, all these these different things.

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But those high income, relatively high income countries vary a lot from one another.

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Hugely. Yes, hugely. Which is very interesting.

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Just give me a couple of examples.

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Well, for example, Sweden never shut down schools or early childhood education and care facilities and never had a general lockdown.

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Sweden did many other countries.

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They did have a general lockdown, but they kept, let's say, the early childhood, the kindergarten and care for young children.

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They kept those open usually on two bases.

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One was if the parents needed it.

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So if parents were key workers, for example, but the others, including this country, if children had a vulnerability,

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if they were considered disadvantaged, some countries prioritised and we were very interested was where was the prioritisation going on.

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So there was so that's one form of variation.

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Another form of variation is the duration of the lockdown.

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In some countries, the lockdown of schools of primary schools was 18 months.

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In some countries in others, schools were open again after four weeks or five weeks.

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I think the certainly New Zealand was very good on that.

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Really, really good, very wide ranging packet of supports.

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They have very low levels of infection, They had very low levels of infection,

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but they had a very strict policy and here a very strict policy meant shutting everything down there.

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It didn't mean shutting everything down and in Australia as well.

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But Australia is a bit more complicated because it's a federal unit.

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So what was happening at the federal level, what was happening at the state level is difficult to track.

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But yeah, so countries varied in whether they shut down schools, far more countries shut down schools and early childhood education,

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surprisingly, and we think that was a devaluation of children in that they didn't consider children's needs.

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They kept early childhood education and care settings open because of parents work obligations, but not for children.

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They closed schools because they didn't feel the same concern for working parents and with school age children.

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What else? I mean, some countries kept kept schools closed for significantly longer after the workplace is reopened.

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It's quite hard to explain that. Other than that, you know, maybe it's protecting children, but maybe it's not.

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So there were so many variations that it's fascinating, actually, to look at what countries did.

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I also have to say that some countries were very innovative and were very quick.

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Another of the variations was how long it took countries to react,

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but some were very innovative, providing quite high levels of income support to families.

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In addition, I remember Austria was a very good case.

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It kept making these or not kept, but it gave a number of benefits to families over a course of time.

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So I think families got, you know, about two or 3000 extra in that year, depending now on their circumstances, because very few countries gave you an.

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Reversal benefits that were usually tied to need or the age of the children or something.

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The other thing that countries did quite rapidly was they gave parents support.

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So they extended parental leaves, for example.

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Some countries even introduced a COVID specific leave, or they enable people to use sickness benefits for specifically for the care of children.

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So that's interesting as well. There's a bit of a two sides to that, though, because, um, you know, uh,

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it's kind of generally considered better for young children to be have some of their care and education outside of the home.

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And of course, what COVID did and what countries supported happening was to move all of that into the

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home and to give parents the responsibility in many cases without resourcing parents.

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And we also know that there was a gender element in that, in that it was usually mothers who who did it.

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And I think in general, closing down the early childhood education and care and the schools is not good for children.

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And we now know that actually there are many learning gaps there.

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I think we'll have to speak I don't know quite of a COVID generation, but we have to be aware.

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There's there's there are many there are many children who are suffering ongoing learning loss because of it.

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I think, again, when read I only read in the papers, but one reads a lot about both about learning loss,

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but also mental health difficulties in children and young people.

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And what I'm assuming the value of your database will be is that at some point we're very complicated,

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but people might be able to tie those things together and relate them to the variation in the provision that was made.

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Well, we certainly have the evidence because we have about ten or 12 fields for each policy action taken,

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including when it was announced, including the announced cost.

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If there was a cost, including, you know, who was the unit of eligibility,

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was it because we do have information on whether countries provided extra psychosocial support or anti-violence support for children?

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And again, we're very interested all the time. Was that child specific?

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Was it explicitly directed at children or was it directed more at parents?

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So we have all of that information. So hopefully in time, yes, people might be able to link it.

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At least we have a record of what countries did. And as far as I know, it's it's a pretty unique record.

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Right. I'm moving on because I know we haven't got very much time, but I see that you've also started a project on care workers themselves.

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Yes. Was that something that came out of what you observed happening during the pandemic?

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Absolutely, very much. I did a I got some research funding from the John Fell fund actually here to do some research on care home workers.

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So not workers, not carers. You know, one always has to use the language very carefully.

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So people who are employed in care home, right.

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Rather than some people call these home care worker, you know, there's also home care workers, people who go into other people's home.

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Yeah. And we interviewed I think it was we had a we had two types of research instrument.

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One was an online survey and the other was an interview.

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And we had, I think about 80 or 90 people who responded to the survey online.

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And then we did interviews, quite detailed follow up interviews with about 30 people.

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And what we wanted to see and it comes back to this thing about caring for and caring about,

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was the kind of commitments that people had that those who are employed as carers have

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and whether in a way they're that commitment allows them to be exploited or even even,

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you know, stops them from making decisions that might be in their interests.

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So many of them, and it was COVID specific, we asked about COVID,

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but I think the general feeling was that people feel it's an extremely difficult job that they do in relatively poor conditions.

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I mean, it's hardly above minimum wage in most instances.

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Hours are very long. The kind of demands on them, sometimes implicit rather than necessarily explicit, explicit.

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They do feel huge levels of commitment. And so they don't just care about care for they also care fundamentally about the people that they care for.

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And that makes them immobile.

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It makes them not able to leave their jobs or it certainly makes the process of thinking about, am I going to leave or can I leave much?

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More difficult than it would be for somebody perhaps who doesn't have that kind of commitment.

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So that was very interesting about how, you know, what are the aspects of their work that that tie them really to where they work.

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And also, I was very interested in the how did they get there?

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So was it, you know, something in there? Was it an absence?

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So sometimes it's because people don't have other skills and there are always care home jobs or care jobs available.

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Or was it something else? Was it something they really wanted to do?

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Was it something they felt was very much in tune with their personality?

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Did it come from their families, for example? And in fact, we did find and of course, they're almost all women.

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Not not I think about maybe 20. It's a the gender breakdown is something like 20, 80%, I think.

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And it's been a challenge for the industry to get men involved, actually.

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But we did find that it kind of was a combination of things that it was in sometimes,

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sometimes low income skilled are sorry, low income people who feel they don't have skills themselves.

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But hey, I took care of an ill grandmother or my mother had a disability or my brother is unwell and I've been able to care for him.

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That gives people confidence to say there were quite a number of cases who had come into care through that personal family route,

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or often also because perhaps their mother was a carer or their grandmother or something.

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So there's definitely a family route into care, but then there are also other routes as well,

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which is sometimes about the local economy and the fact that people who do this work, they may not be able to travel for the work.

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So there's a care home locally and they work in a care home.

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But it was very it was a very affecting piece of research, really.

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They I was very engaged with their stories.

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I found that I had a researcher working with me on that.

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So both of us were very engaged with the stories that they told, very moving stories, really.

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MM And have you looked at all the way care for older and vulnerable people is structured?

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I mean, in this country it seems to have gone more and more into the,

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into the private sector and ownership of care homes is now something that private equity companies are interested in.

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Whereas I don't I don't know enough about the history, but I assume that once upon a time it was seen much more as a local authority responsibility.

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Andy Wood Yeah, I mean it was it's actually a revolution how let's say 40 years ago you would have had, it would be probably 90% local authority.

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Now it's 5%. So it's really a revolution.

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And I think and the way I understand the statistic now, let's say, in England is something like 5% local authority of care homes.

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Now we're talking about 5% local authority, 85% for profit.

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So these this is a classification that's used. They're commercial entities.

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And then around something like ten, 12% for the more community based organisation.

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So that is a revolution. And yes, I've looked at that.

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I've looked at that not just in England but in many other countries and actually in the whole kind of care,

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the working on 2020 on care homes that I did, the article and so forth, it was very much about the structure.

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So the lack of governance, the seek you see Care quality commission, how limited their role is,

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how limited the role of the Department of Health and Social Care is, how much this is now seen as a for profit entity.

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Even though, having said that, I think it's most of the care home industry is still small care homes,

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often local based, and they are for profit nominally, but often they they're not huge profit making entities.

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In fact, they're less and less so. So, yes, the structure is very important.

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And I've also done some work on looking at that internationally.

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It is very extreme in the UK. Nowhere else.

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While the US may be thinking of more the European Union countries and that nowhere else really has a structure like like we have,

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I think Ireland may be a bit, but other than that it's much more state run or state funded with strong governance.

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I think in this country we have turned too quickly to the private market.

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And I don't know I don't know if that's a positive.

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Development, really, because it's hard to police the private market.

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And one hears stories about profit taking that they, you know, sell the assets or take the money out of the assets.

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And then the operation of the care home is working on less resources on that.

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And what percentage of people in the country are funded by the local authorities?

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I think quite a small amount. I'm trying to recall the.

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I'm trying to recall, I think something like between 50% and 60% of people in care homes in England fund themselves.

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They may not fully fund themselves, but they're primarily what are called self funders.

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And actually and they pay a lot of money, but actually they then almost inadvertently subsidise the public patients because if you talk to care homes,

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they'll say we try to take as many of the self funders as we can because we don't get enough from the

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local authorities for the the people who who need their help or need need to have their care funded.

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But there is a bit of a grey area because the local authorities can park fund as well.

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So it's not so clear who is fully funded by the local authorities.

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I think it's small. I think it's less than 20% who is fully funded and then there's probably another 50%

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or 40 something who are fully self-funded and in between people are subsidised,

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but mostly people self-fund. Mm hmm.

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Mm hmm. And yes, I think I've we've got 5 minutes left,

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so I'll come to my final questions about how the working through the pandemic impacted on you personally.

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I mean, first of all,

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how threatened did you feel by the virus itself or did you think once you'd had that very bad respiratory illness in February that was you done?

334
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No, I felt threatened by it. I felt I was going to get it.

335
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And I you know, it changed my practice because of it.

336
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I moved home. I mean, we shut down here, I moved home.

337
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I set up an office at home.

338
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I used to work at home a little bit, but never really as much as I like the routine of coming to the office, of walking to and fro.

339
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So I was very affected by it, I think, and changed everything I did like everybody else.

340
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I imagine so. And did you do you live alone or did?

341
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My partner was with me at that stage. He doesn't live all the time with me, but he was with me at that stage.

342
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And, you know, we we worked together. I mean, we we went out once a day or whatever we were allowed to do and shopping once a week.

343
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I recall if I still feel when I look back that it still affects me.

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That idea of when you've done your shop, you've somehow you're somehow okay.

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You know, we had to do, if you recall, just one shop in the week.

346
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I think that's all. That's how I recall it. And I remember saying, okay, that's the food and for the week, such a sense.

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And then you come home and you start to clean everything. Because at that stage we still thought the antibacterial wipes would work.

348
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But by June, I guess when we reopened again, I started to come into the office and there weren't many people who came in,

349
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but I felt I needed it for my work environment and probably also for my health.

350
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So I was coming and going. Then from then on, observing the lockdowns and there were periods again when we were fully lockdown,

351
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but we were able to come and those of us who are involved in teaching were able to come in because we had to do a lot of teaching online.

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And sometimes you wouldn't have the Internet connection sufficiently reliable at home.

353
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So we had to do it here. So there were some of us in.

354
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And do you think working that the experience of that I mean, more remote working and so on, has that changed your practice now,

355
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now that technically we're supposed to think of it this all over, although I don't think it is,

356
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but at least now that we've all been vaccinated, the, the, the threat is less.

357
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But are you using remote working more than you were previously?

358
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Am I? Yes, I think I am, but probably not less or I'm travelling much less.

359
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I'm travelling much less. I'm glad of that for all kinds of reasons, not least the environment.

360
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And I'm just thrilled at what what a world has been opened up to us by virtue of teams and all of Zoom and all of these other programmes.

361
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And I work at home a bit more than I used to, but I still am.

362
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And I come into the office because I like the sociability of it, I like I like the structure of it.

363
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But I think there is a kind of I appreciate the flexibility introduced really by how we got our technology right.

364
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Or almost right during COVID. So I am the effect goes on, I think and that is my final question.

365
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Has the experience of working through and working on issues related to the pandemic changed your attitude or your approach to what you do?

366
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And it's made me more convinced that I was right about a lot of things,

367
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that I am right that people who can't take care of themselves are downgraded and that we

368
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can't rely on government or public institutions or private institutions or whatever.

369
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We have to keep us as academics, as researchers.

370
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We have to keep talking about this. We have to keep making it public.

371
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So I think it has it has made me more sensitive, I suppose, underwear, but I think I had that sensitivity all the time.

372
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I'm just more convinced now that also when I see the post-COVID world, I don't think it's changed, actually.

373
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And this is what we find when we look at what's happened on children.

374
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In fact, some of the good things that were done with and for children prior to COVID 19, like hearing their voices, consulting them about a lot more.

375
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Those things haven't come back in the volume you would like, really.

376
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And equally, I think maybe the same is true for people in care homes.

377
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We never actually heard their voices, really. We did hear the voices of their relatives and that was a very good development, I think.

378
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And they are still speaking, which is great. But I still feel the silences have even increased in some respects following COVID.

379
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We're not back to where we were, I think, on the good things.

380
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Great. Thank you very much.