It has been another uneasy week for relatives of the residents of the 700 care homes in Britain run by the struggling Southern Cross group. David Cameron, prime minister, has given assurances that people too old to look after themselves will not be woken one morning by an insolvency practitioner asking them to leave. But the legal basis on which he does so is not clear.

Still, Mr Cameron knows that if necessary parliament will give him whateverretrospective authority he needs to make good on his pledge. We have been here before. Alastair Darling, former chancellor, found himself in a similar position as queues formed outside the branches of Northern Rock. We will invent a way to ensure that the intolerable does not happen. There is evidently a policy gap.

The problem is hardly new. The second-largest operator of homes for the elderly, Four Seasons, is owned by a consortium of banks following a forced debt equity swap two years ago. Ironically, Four Seasons’ biggest shareholder is Royal Bank of Scotland, the bank recapitalised by the taxpayer as a result of making too many loans like that one.