Care homes have said Matt Hancock’s promise of nationwide testing to allow visits by Christmas is unlikely to be achieved without urgent funding, adding that it is “distressing and dangerous to raise expectations without the policies in place to achieve this”. Vic Rayner, the executive director of the National Care Forum, said care homes wanted to allow visits but efforts to make it possible across the country needed to start immediately rather than after a pilot programme that started this week. On Monday, Hancock set the target of pre-Christmas visiting nationwide, saying: “I hope to have [visitor testing] in place for all care homes by Christmas.” The health secretary has been facing mounting pressure from residents and relatives groups, as well Labour and Conservative backbench MPs to make more visiting possible. Visiting guidelines issued to care homes on 5 November were condemned for proposing prison-like conditions, with floor-to-ceiling screens and intercoms. Hancock was speaking on the first day of a four-week pilot project testing visitors to just 20 care homes in Hampshire, Devon and Cornwall, areas which have low infection rates. But there are about 15,550 care homes in England, with more than 400,000 residents. Care operators point out that it took several months for the government to roll out testing of care home staff. “We are writing the protocols for how you can make visiting safe using testing and the protocols for how this works will then allow this to be rolled out across the country,” Hancock told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. But Rayner said: “We have a four-week pilot for 20 homes and that takes us to 14 December. What he is promising is to extend this to almost 16,000 homes in less than a fortnight. We can’t go from pilot to implementation in 11 days. We need to get ready for this now and understand what it is going to cost.” She said the initiative involved setting up, in effect, “mini-labs” in every home, with staff trained to oversee swab testing of visitors’ throats and noses, recording, reporting and processing of lateral flow tests. It requires a separate room and visitors will need an isolated location to await results – both of which are likely to cost homes money through lost fees for those rooms. Hancock stressed the danger of allowing the virus to spread in care homes, wheremore than 18,000 people are known to have died from confirmed or suspected Covid-19 in the UK. There were coronavirus outbreaks in about 280 care homes in the week to 8 November, an increase of about 40 on the previous fortnight. However, levels of infection have been considerably lower than in the spring. Hancock said: “The problem is that we know when this virus gets into care homes, we know that people in care homes are particularly vulnerable to it and it runs rife. So we need to protect people from the virus but also do that in as a humane a way as possible. And we know the impact on people’s health, let alone everything else, on not being able to see visitors.” Labour has urged the government to use spare capacity from the NHS test-and-trace system to screen care home visitors. Liz Kendall, the shadow care minister, said the latest evidence showed there were about 157,000 spare PCR swab tests in the daily capacity, and using 35% to 40% of that spare capacity could allow testing of one family member for every care home resident in the country. “The average time someone lives in a care home is two years before they pass away,” she said. “So for many families every single week matters and they are worried this could be the last Christmas and if they don’t get to see their loved one it will be deeply upsetting for them and cause terrible problems for the residents.”