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Will Andy Burnham be the PM to fix social care?
After 22 failed reforms in 30 years, former health secretary faces huge funding challenge
“Overlooked and underfunded” adult social care has become “the Cinderella service of our wider welfare system”, said Labour List. Now Andy Burnham, whose father has Alzheimer’s and lives in a care home, has told the BBC that he will put “whatever political capital I have” into fixing it.
He is not the first prime minister to vow to tackle the issue. But “successive governments have come undone when faced with the tricky reality” of adequately funding state support to help older people live safely and independently, said The Times.
What did the commentators say?
There have been 22 botched attempts to the reform the English adult social care system in the past 30 years. And those successive failures carry “a heavy political cost”, said Chris Smyth in the Financial Times: long-term underfunding has made pay and conditions in the sector so unattractive to British workers that “visa rules were loosened after Brexit” and care workers arriving from abroad became “the single biggest reason why net immigration to the UK rose to all-time high”.
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Now, as Britain’s “demographic centre of gravity” tilts towards retirement, social care is reaching its “most painful financial pinch point” yet, said The Telegraph's editorial board. In 50 years, more than 25% of the population could be over the age of 65, according to the Office for National Statistics. The “best solution” for funding social care on that scale would be an “insurance-based system, where Britons would be encouraged to pay into a fund that would cover their own care in old age, should they need it”.
But Burnham has said social care should be delivered “on an NHS basis”. This implies “a public service free at the point of delivery and funded by some form of taxation”, said The Guardian’s editorial board. When Burnham was health secretary in 2010, he proposed a “national care service” to be funded by a deferred levy on dead people’s estates. Other options could include “a new form of social insurance” or “a combination of private and state payments”.
A more “ambitious” solution would be take responsibility for funding social care away from local councils, whose “revenues don’t map neatly on to local care needs”, and simultaneously reform council tax as a central tax that better reflects current property values and generates revenue for a national social care service, said Ben Zaranko in The Observer. That would “create losers, be complicated and take time but the course of true radical social care reform never did run smooth”.
What next?
Burnham is scheduled to deliver a speech on adult social care on Wednesday. In it, he will “stop short of unveiling” any concrete plans, said the BBC, instead announcing that he is speeding up Louise Casey’s independent review of possible solutions for the system.
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Yet “the veteran Whitehall troubleshooter on whom Burnham is relying to come up with answers” has already warned there is no quick fix, said the FT’s Smyth. Earlier this month, she said “we cannot keep pretending that a few tweaks will fix adult social care, or attempt major reform without the public’s backing”.
