Good morning. Yesterday Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, told Sky News that, while Andy Burnham spent his first week as PM focusing on cost of living issues, this week the public would see “a prime minister that runs towards big and difficult issues rather than runs away from [them]”. Those challenges include reforming social care and, as Peter Walker reports, Burnham has pledged to use “whatever political capital I have” to finally fix the crumbling social care system in England, saying that without rapid action the NHS could effectively collapse.
Burnham was speaking in a 30-minute interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg going out on Panorama tonight. The BBC put the full interview on iPlayer at 6am this morning, and there is a write-up on the BBC’s website here.
Burnham is due to give a speech on social care on Wednesday, but he is due to be addressing other problem issues this week as well. According to Andrew McDonald and Megan McElroy in their London Playbook briefing for Politico, tomorrow we are getting some announcement on getting young people back to work, on Thursday a defence-related announcement is due, and on Friday Burnham is expected to unveil plans (first reported in the Sunday Times) to give more control over how government money gets spent in their areas.
In his interview with Kuenssberg, Burnham was asked if he would put a new social care system in place before the next election. He did not make that commitment; he has only got three years at best, and full reform could take the best part of a decade. But he did say that he wanted to go “as quickly as I can on the reform” and that there were “major changes you can make before the next election”.
Burnham does not need Tory votes to pass legislation to reform social care in the Commons because he has a working majority of 166. But Burnham’s plans won’t survive if the next election results in Labour being replaced by a government committed to ripping them up. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, has indicated that he hopes Burnham will produce plans that the Liberal Democrats can support. But Reform UK and the Conservatives have both signalled that they might use their opposition to the Burnham plan. When Burnham was health secretary before the 2010 general election, he floated a proposal to fund better social care through a levy on inheritance. The Tories immediately labelled this a death tax, it became hugely unpopular, and Labour had largely dropped the idea even before they lost the election.
We don’t know what Burnham will propose this time; the veteran Whitehall fixer Louise Casey is leading a review, and Burnham is expected to ask her to produce a final report soon, instead of waiting until 2028 as originally planned. But Burnham has talked about the case for a “care levy”.
In an article for the Sunday Telegraph yesterday, Robert Jenrick, the Reform UK Treasury spokesperson, said his party would oppose anything that amounted to a “radical tax grab”. He said voters “rightly want meaningful efficiency savings, not another tax assault”, and he challenged Burnham to hold an election on this issue. He has been repeating this message on GB News.
This morning, in an open letter to Burnham, Kemi Badenoch has implied that she is willing to work with Labour on this. “The Conservatives are happy to work with you and other parties on reforming social care,” she says. But she also makes it clear that she will fight like fury any plan Burnham is realistically likely to propose.
She says:
But we will only support a solution that abides by two core principles.
First, any solution to the issues around social care must also be fair to those who have made provisions and saved up over the course of their lives.
Second, the money must be found by reducing current spending. You must rule out any tax rises, or increased borrowing that will ultimately fall on the next generation to pay for.
Compared to the last Conservative government’s budget plans, spending in 2028/29 alone will be £152bn higher (that’s 11% above what was planned in that year under the Conservatives). As a result, taxes will be £105bn higher (up 8%) and borrowing will be £47bn higher (more than double previous plans).
The tax burden has risen to a record high under Labour, and there is already speculation that you will increase taxes further at the budget this autumn in order to pay for all the things you have announced in your first week, plus the outstanding gaps in funding for the defence investment plan.
(Labour is spending a lot more than the last Conservative government budgeted for the second half of this decade. But the Tory long-term spending projections were widely criticised at the time by economists as unrealistically low.)
I will post more on Burnham’s BBC interview soon.
Here is the agenda for the day.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Afternoon: Andy Burnham meets Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, at a naval base in the UK.
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