Many care home staff worked overtime without extra pay to prop up the system during the pandemic, according to a new study.

Research by Warwick Business School says public money helped stabilise UK care homes during the first wave of COVID-19 but it was withdrawn too soon and not focused on staff.

The report, Bailed Out and Burned Out?, co-written by University College London and the Centre for Health and the Public Interest think tank, says that while many homes struggled financially, some larger companies were able to pay more to shareholders.

The researchers studied the accounts of more than 4,000 UK care home companies from just before the pandemic and during the first year of the health crisis.

They found nearly two thirds of homes were already financially fragile as the pandemic took hold.

The report accuses the Government of failing to plan for ‘highly predictable’ damage to the sector's financial viability during the pandemic.

An extra £2.1bn of public money pumped into the sector at the peak of the pandemic helped many care homes avoid financial collapse, but not all of it reached the front lines and most of the payments ended in 2022, say the authors.

The report recommends that as part of its plans for future pandemics the Government should ‘significantly improve its understanding of the financial situation of care home companies, model their potential impact on the financial viability of the care sector, and ensure that any extra funding is adequate, spent in line with public priorities, and easy to administer.’