Friday, July 31, 2026
Is this progress on social care or a false dawn?
The new Labour prime minister held a summit in Downing Street on Wednesday with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and Lib Dem leader Ed Davey to begin the process of thrashing out a way to deliver social care before it collapses the NHS.
As John Crace writes in the Guardian, this issue is personal for Burnham, as it is for Davey and for a lot of us too. Crace says that at last we have a prime minister who is emotionally intelligent, who understands the country and can connect with it, and who is prepared to expend political capital to get the things done that other politicians were too weak to go near:
This was Andy Burnham’s first big set piece since taking office. And he went straight for social care. An issue that previous governments over the past 30 years have done their utmost to avoid. A royal commission, 22 reviews and absolutely nothing has changed. Too difficult, too many hard choices. Far simpler to keep on with a system that’s failing. Let the next government deal with it. They can take the hits. Just concentrate on trying to win the next election.
“This is personal to me,” said Andy, as he addressed a small audience of care workers and the media at Jewish Care in north London. Personal because his father has dementia and needs daily care.
It’s personal for a lot of us. It’s personal for me. My mother had Alzheimer’s and needed to be in a care home for seven years before she died last year. My sisters and I had to sell her home to pay for the care she got. We didn’t resent it. It was just what needed to happen and the care she got from a mostly overseas staff was superb. We couldn’t have asked for more. But my mother would have been bitterly upset had she been aware of what we had done. Before she got dementia she had always been so proud she would be able to leave her house to us children. It was to have been her last gift to us.
But there is a reason why social care has proven to be so difficult to fix. As Crace points out no one wants to pay for social care until the point when you find you have no choice. And that applies to the country as a whole when it comes to raising the money to pay for what needs to be done.
Already, Reform UK are trying to reawaken the outcry against a so-called 'death tax' even though there are no actual proposals on the table as yet. And there will be hard choices if we are to fix this problem.
I am confident that solutions can be found, they need to be if we are to support our aging population and take pressure off the NHS. The question is whether those solutions can survive a cross-party approach, or will one or another break off from the consensus in favour of making political capital on the price we will have to pay to get it right?
It is at that point that the real test of Burnham's resolve comes into play, and whether he has the support to take the issue to a conclusion in the face of damaging headlines from the right wing press and poorer opinion poll ratings.
The prime minister has raised expectations, he now needs to deliver on them. This cannot be another false dawn.
