\n<\/p>\n
For campaigners perpetually disappointed by the failure of England\u2019s political classes to fix England\u2019s creaking adult social care system, the fear was that Andy Burnham\u2019s long-trailed speech on Wednesday would be less Brave New World, more Groundhog Day.<\/p>\n
Burnham acknowledged he had been here before. Back in 2010, as health and social care secretary, he unveiled extensive proposals to overhaul social care, only for them to collapse amid rightwing media hostility and furious political rows about \u201cdeath taxes\u201d.<\/p>\n
The new PM might talk a good game about expending political capital on an issue close to his heart, but recent history suggests that social care reform invariably ends up in what the King\u2019s Fund thinktank calls the \u201cWestminster graveyard of good intentions\u201d \u2013 22 official reviews in the past 30 years, all which have come to nothing<\/p>\n
Burnham sketched out his broad ambitions for social care reform in a brisk, partly off-the-cuff speech at a Jewish care home in north London on Wednesday. There was, as expected, little policy detail, but enough to show a clear direction of travel.<\/p>\n
He would be accelerating Louise Casey\u2019s review of social care, which under Keir Starmer had been slated for 2028, effectively pushing it back into a putative Labour second term. Lady Casey\u2019s recommendations for a National Care Service would be published within 12 months. He would back Casey \u201c100%\u201d, he promised.<\/p>\n
He was dropping no clues as to what it might look like. It could be \u201cfully fledged or lesser options or something in between\u201d, he said vaguely. Casey would come up with funding options. But it wasn\u2019t just about money: the quality of social care had to improve, work more closely with the NHS, be built around the needs of care users.<\/p>\n
There would be investment and focus on the social care workforce, boosting pay and training. He wasn\u2019t opposed to private providers (which currently provide most care in England) but he wouldn\u2019t put up with \u201cprofiteering\u201d by care firms. There needed to be more support for unpaid carers, too often broken by their sacrifices.<\/p>\n
The key message, however, was about politics. Blame for the dire state of English social care lay with his generation of politicians, he said. They had serially ducked the challenge of reform, put point-scoring before fixing injustices, fomented a political culture of risk aversion and inertia.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow have we got to a position where it\u2019s too difficult to fix the basic care that we give to each other, that fellow human beings receive?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n
He arrived at No 10 promising he would do politics differently, but this was a challenge to the other main political parties to do the same. He wouldn\u2019t be drawn on whether he\u2019d raise tax to reform social care, but it felt like he was prepared to test the very idea that a government might raise taxes to fix a glaring social injustice.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf everybody, on the NHS principle, contributed a little, it would mean everyone could protect the majority of what they\u2019d worked for,\u201d he said at one point. \u201cNow I know the Mail and probably the Telegraph doesn\u2019t support that. But I don\u2019t know \u2013 do people support that?\u201d<\/p>\n
skip past newsletter promotionFree newsletter | Every day<\/p>\n
Sign up to Headlines UK<\/span><\/p>\n Get the day\u2019s headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n The consensus in the social care world was that this was an impressive start. \u201cThere was a sense of excitement in the room,\u201d one veteran campaigner said. \u201cHe had every opportunity to downplay expectations but he didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n Burnham showed passion, humanity, and a grasp of detail. He framed the injustices simply. He strikingly compared the inequity of social care in England with the privatised US healthcare system: \u201cThe vulnerable pay with everything and it can completely leave them with nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n For once, some observers said, with a flicker of amazement, there was clear political will, from the very top, to break the entrenched consensus that fixing social care is impossible. It\u2019s early days, but for now there is the rare whiff of hope and optimism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For campaigners perpetually disappointed by the failure of England\u2019s political classes to fix England\u2019s creaking adult social care system, the fear was that Andy Burnham\u2019s long-trailed speech on Wednesday would be less Brave New World, more Groundhog Day. Burnham acknowledged he had been here before. Back in 2010, as health and social care secretary, he<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51508,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[2094,8090,3265,165,131,3280,22732,10957,204,1053,550],"class_list":{"0":"post-51507","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-andy","9":"tag-brave","10":"tag-burnham","11":"tag-care","12":"tag-day","13":"tag-ground","14":"tag-groundhog","15":"tag-revisits","16":"tag-social","17":"tag-speech","18":"tag-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}