Burnham must stop campaigning, begin work

Labour’s slogan for this week’s party conference is “Hope Again”, which is very much the sort of mood and language — “vibes” — in which Andy Burnham specialises; it did, after all, help him seize the leadership of his party from Sir Keir Starmer, according to The Independent.

Nowhere is this mood of hope, even blind optimism, more necessary for progress than in the reform of social care. It is a cause to which Burnham re-dedicated himself in his television interview with Laura Kuenssberg. The recent passing of his father, Roy, is a reminder of the prime minister’s personal experience of how the NHS and care system interact — or don’t. Roy Burnham had been in care for several years, living with a diagnosis of prostate cancer and receiving specialised care for his advanced Alzheimer’s; as the prime minister noted, his father did not understand that his son had been appointed prime minister.

Many voters will be familiar with these kinds of experiences. Burnham has tried to make the case for a fairer and more effective social care system ever since he was the secretary of state for social care in Gordon Brown’s government. Like everyone else, Burnham will also have seen successive prime ministers — notably Theresa May and Boris Johnson — fail to meet their own promises to fix the crisis in social care “once and for all”.

Now it is Burnham’s turn, and he is setting down the principles for what he may hope will become known as the Burnham reforms. Often criticised for vagueness, the prime minister is at least clearer now that his new care system will “work on NHS principles” — free at the point of use, paid for by everyone — though a “precise explanation” as to how it’s going to be funded will follow, perhaps with more details disclosed in his keynote speech on Tuesday. Progress of sorts is being made. In his first weeks in power, Burnham set in train useful work so that frail elderly patients can move seamlessly between hospitals, home care and community services; this has the additional bonus of freeing up hospital beds. He also wants more “preventative” social care, supporting people to live in their own homes for longer.

True to his desire to reach across party lines, Burnham took some steps over time summer to involve opposition parties in creating a consensus for change; but the fact he is now suggesting he will put his care plan forward in a Labour manifesto at the next general election must mean he thinks that hopes for a strong cross-party agreement are slim — and it is difficult to see Reform UK sacrificing such a rich field of cynical grievance cultivation among its core constituency of older electors.

Burnham rejects the idea that his care service will be as costly as some experts suggest — less than £18bn a year, he says. Yet every one of the many studies into social care funding, from the Dilnot review 15 years ago onwards, has concluded no system can be financially sustainable without some personal contribution by individuals or their families, making it correspondingly challenging to make a system that is politically acceptable. At some point, personal wealth — principally vested in the family home — has to enter the equation. Whether such a system still counts as “free at the point of use” is debatable. Hope can be a powerful word for a party leader, especially when it becomes synonymous with them; it was part of the zeitgeist of Labour governments elected in 1945, 1964 and 1997 (and, although not for long, in 2024 as well). But it is double-edged; if hopes are raised only to be dashed, voters will feel more betrayed, and angry.

Burnham still sounds more like a man running for the Labour leadership than a prime minister with a job of work to do and painful choices to make. He is a much more instinctive politician than his lawyerly, cautious, predecessor but he has no more money than Sir Keir did to fix Britain’s problems. The looming Budget will surely mark the end of the extended Burnham honeymoon; for now, he may as well enjoy his week back “home” in Liverpool.