Politics Home Article | Social Care In England As Unfair As US Healthcare, Says Burnham

Andy Burnham set out a roadmap to reforming social care (Alamy)

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Speaking at a care home in London on Wednesday morning, Andy Burnham said he was willing to take a hit to his own popularity to bring forward changes. “I know this will require me to put what political capital I have on the table. And it might wear down that political capital in some ways,” he said.

He added that any reform to social care will “require difficult decisions” and the Labour government would be “honest with people about those”. 

“We will put them before the country at the right time, and we will hopefully proceed with people’s consent,” he said.

He added that social care is intrinsically linked to pressures facing the NHS and cannot be treated like it “lives in its own silo”.

“There is no way we can restore the NHS to the standards we all want to see without fixing this issue. We can’t do it,” the PM said.

Successive governments have attempted to grapple with the issue of rising costs of social care. While health secretary under Gordon Brown in 2010, Burnham himself backed the introduction of a 10 per cent levy on estates to pay for a universal National Care Service.

Planned changes have failed to materialise, however, often due to the issue being seen as too politically difficult. Even supporters of social care reform accept that it will be expensive, with experts estimating it will cost billions of pounds a year.

But Burnham said he could “never forgive himself” if he didn’t try to fix the system while in power, stressing that there had been 22 reviews into social care in the last three decades. “It’s a major dereliction of public duty that Parliament has not faced up to this… It’s shameful, to be honest,” the PM said.

The term social care describes support for adults with care and support needs. In England, it is arranged by local authorities, and some people receive state support to help pay for it.

With the UK facing an ageing population, demand on social care has increased in recent years, putting severe pressure on local authorities which help provide it.

The Telegraph reported overnight that officials were drawing up plans for a new tax on income to fund social care as one of the options to reform the system. Asked if the government can transform social care without raising taxes, Burnham said: “I think more is possible within existing budgets”.

On Wednesday morning, Baroness Louise Casey, who is leading a government commission on reforming the social care system, told The Today programme that pay for carers should rise as part of reforms.

Her words were echoed by the PM later when he said carers “should be the best paid people in society, not the worst” and that he would focus “immediately” on strengthening the social care workforce.

Referencing the previous government’s introduction of a fair pay agreement for social care staff, which is due to come in the financial year 2028-29, Burnham said that move was a “massive building block of a national care service”.

Building on this, the PM said he wanted “to look at how we turn the fair pay agreement into a bigger reform to improve the social care workforce”. He said he also wanted to start to think about progression routes for young people coming into social care.

Casey also announced the launch of the “big conversation on care”. 

Casey was commissioned by the previous government under Keir Starmer to chair an independent commission into adult social care, which was due to report in 2028. Burnham has asked Casey to bring her report forward a year, to 2027.

Later today, Burnham will convene a virtual summit with Conservatives and Liberal Democrats as part of a cross-party attempt to fix the social care system. 

Asked about the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which is set to be reintroduced by a backbench MP,  the PM said that he believed that the debate should not come before the “fixing of the funding of palliative care and social care.

Speaking before, Health Secretary Yvette Cooper said that the government would appoint a “dementia tsar” later this year.