Here are some pictures from the Andy Burnham social care event.
Burnham urges media to avoid scaremongering in debate on case for NHS-type reform to protect families from huge costs
Q: [From Millie Cooke from the Independent] Do you think people should not have to sell their homes to pay for care?
Burnham said:
In an ideal world I wouldn’t want anybody, to have to sell their their home to pay for care. I think it’s a really awful process for those who live through it … I think the whole thing is horrendous for those who live through it. They see everything that their parents have worked for just whittled away in front of them, paying for care that often isn’t good enough.
So I think the system, isn’t right. And in an ideal world, no, I, I wouldn’t want to see that.
Burnham said the proposals he put forward in 2010 (see 11.23am) were designed to address that.
He went on:
If everybody, on the NHS principle, contributed a little, it would mean everyone could protect the majority of what they’d worked for.
Now I know the Mail and probably in the Telegraph doesn’t support that.
But I don’t know – do people support that?
And this is the point. What I got wrong, as I said before (see 10.51am), was going to close to a general election when there just wasn’t time for those issues to breathe.
And I do ask colleagues in the media again, can we not let the country look at this in a quite clear-eyed way without all of the the hype and the overwriting of some of these issues?
On this issue, please can we have a factual debate. Can we allow people to weigh up the different options that Louise might put forward, and then just come to a considered view based on those facts.
Is that too much to ask? I don’t think it should be too much to ask, because I think the public will give us their view. They’ll make it really clear what they feel they can accept and what they can’t.
We won’t get to that point if there’s all of this stuff swirling around, and everyone frightened about everything. That just won’t get us there.
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Q: Are you ruling out tax rises?
Burnham did not rule out tax rises, but he said it was very important to him to stick to Labour’s manifesto (which did rule out raising income tax, national insurance or VAT).
Burnham says life has 'moved on' from when he proposed care levy in 2010, and 'more voluntary approach' may be better now
Q: [From Daniel Martin from the Telegraph] In 2010 you were in favour of compulsory insurance. Are you still in favour of that?
Burnham replied:
I have views that are on on the record, but life has moved on from when I was first looking at social care in 2010.
We are in a difficult world from a financial point of view.
And I would come back to what I said a moment ago. I can feel whatever I want to feel, but if I want to persuade others and get a cross-party consensus, you don’t just go in and say, ‘It’s got to be my way, and that’s it.’
Because how do you persuade people?
I think there are ways of looking at this that could include a more voluntary approach initially, or could include a roadmap to a reformed social care system.
In 2010 Burnham proposed three options for funding better social care, including a 10% levy on inheritances.
Here is our story from 2010 about his proposals.
And here is an extract from that 2010 story.
A new social care system, [Burnham] said, could be financed in one of three ways.
One, people could decide to defer retirement to 68 and use their pension contributions for three years to pay for a care fund. Two, people could pay in instalments in the run-up to retiring at 65. Three, an estate levy could be deducted from the property of older people when they die.
Health department officials said that they were looking at a levy rate of 10%. “This is not a flat fee and would enable people to protect 90% of their homes and savings,” Burnham told the conference. He said the levy would be “progressive” as the millionaire would pay more than the ordinary pensioner.
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Burnham says any move to allow assisted dying should not happen until better palliative care in place
Q: Do you support assisted dying?
Burnham said he was not opposed to this being debated. But he went on:
Personally, I think there’s something that needs to happen first, and that’s the fixing of the funding of palliative care and social care.
I think it is very challenging to introduce that wider debate in a context of people not receiving that care and having peace of mind about that care.
Burnham says social care in England 'as unfair as American healthcare'
Q: [From Sky’s Sam Coates] People can only get funded care if their assets are worth less than £23,250? Do you think that figure is too low?
Burnham says under the current system people can end up paying hundreds of thousands of pounds because they have to spend it on care. It is like a “roulette table”.
I think social care in England is as unfair as American healthcare. The vulnerable pay with everything and it can completely leave them with nothing.
And that floor has been in place for a long, long time.
Burnham says the Dilnot report 15 years ago looked at a solution to this.
He goes on:
But it’s not the case that the funding and the paying for social care is the only issue.
As I’ve said before, [there is] a whole other set of issues here that have to be that have to be considered.
Burnham also says:
We do have to be sure that there isn’t profiteering in the system. I think that is where we absolutely draw draw the line.
There are good organisations in all sectors, but what we cannot accept is money being taken out.
And we actually do see that happening, not just in adult social care, we see it in children’s social care too.
Burnham does not rule out tax rises for social care reform, but says current inefficiencies should be tackled first
Q: [From ITV’s Rebecca Barry] Can the government realistically reform social care without raising taxes?
Burnham says existing resources can be used more effectively.
I think more is possible from within existing resources. And the things that I’ve talked about today, particularly around the workforce, will be fully funded.
I think it is possible from existing budgets to do much more.
I mentioned that whole thing of people coming into hospital unnecessarily from social care settings, then having a long stay in hospital as a result of that unnecessary admission, and then a long period where they’re medically fit to leave, but can’t, because the care is not available. Now, that very last bit has been [estimated to cost the NHS] £2.5bn a year.
If you add all of it up, you are talking several billion pounds a year is lost from the lack of a preventative front-end social care service that’s well supported.
Burnham says government needs to address these problems “before we talk about tax rises”.
But Burnham goes on to say:
I think Louise [Casey – see 10.18am] indicated some of what we would want to in the fullest sense will require difficult decisions.
He goes on:
But we will be honest with people about those. We will put them before the country at the right time, and we will hopefully proceed with people’s consent.
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Burnham accepts social care reform likely to wear down his political capital
Burnham says he accepts he could lose “political capital” through this.
This is huge for me.
I know that this will require me to put what political capital I have on the table, and it could be it wears down that political capital in some ways.
But I’m prepared to do it. I’m prepared to do it because this has gone on too long. The risks of failing to act are too great.
Burnham says he's doing social care reform now because he does not want to leave it until close to election
Burnham is now taking questions.
Q: [From Alison Holt from the BBC] We have had cross-party talks before. What will be different this time? Are today’s talks just a show? And can you get change before the election?
Burnham says his experience as health secretary in the 2005-10 parliament convinced him they left reform too late in that parliament.
He thinks it is better to do it sooner.
He goes on:
That answers another story from the media, doesn’t it? That there’s no election on the horizon.
I think it’s best to deal with it, early and to listen.
As for the talks today, he says he is holding them because Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey wrote to him asking if he would engage.
Burnham says he would 'never forgive myself' if he let 'screaming headlines' put him off trying social care reform
Burnham ends by saying he won’t be put off by negative headlines.
I’m not going to be deflected by the point scoring or the screaming headlines that comes out of that point scoring. That is what has set back social care.
And I come back to this point about the political culture of this country and the media culture of this country.
If we’re trying to shut down the fact that you have a serious debate about an issue like this, if that’s what that is trying to do, well, it’s shame on all of us if we say, ‘Well, I’m not brave enough then to go into that.’
Well, I’m just not going to do that in my time in office … I would never forgive myself.
Who knows how long I will be in this position, but as long as I am, I will do my best to find a solution.
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Burnham accepts he may need to compromise on social care reform
Burnham says he wants to make progress on the fair pay agreement for carers.
And he says he wants to pursue a cross-party approach.
That might involve compromise, he says.
Burnham goes on to say he wants the Casey review to address the case for a National Care Service.
And let me also just say something about what I want that review to address.
I go back to what we proposed in 2010, and Phil Hope was minister at that time, a National Care service.
Well, why do we talk about that? Because we need to talk about a system that can become highly integrated with the NHS.
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Burnham says Casey's social care review to be fast-tracked, so final recommendations out by summer 2027
Burnham says he has asked Louise Casey to produce her final report with recommendations on social care reform by the summer of 2027.
That is a year earlier than planned, he says.
So, working with, Yvette [Cooper] and with Angela [Rayner] and other colleagues, we want to expedite that review.
We ideally want to do it even sooner, but we’ve got to be realistic.
But if we say a year from now that we have that independent review, then I think we can rise to this challenge with the urgency it requires.
Burnham says he agreed with what Ed Davey said in his Today interview this morning about the pressures carers are under.
We see people struggling in in their homes looking after a partner or a relative.
It can break people if they’re kind of left without that support that they need.
In fact, it does break people, and that needs to be recognised.
It needs to be recognised that people can see everything they’ve worked for wiped out by the costs of care. Hundreds of thousands of pounds can just disappear paying for care.
Adults with disabilities will say that they face very unfair care charges just to live, just to live their life. That needs to be recognised.
Burnham calls for media to be responsible in way social media crisis is reported
Burnham says this is a challenge for politicians and the media.
There is something here that is a test for the political and the media culture in this country when it comes to this issue, how it’s spoken about, how it’s reported.
It’s for everybody. Everybody needs to take on board, what is being launched today with this Big Conversation, because I think everybody needs to engage in it responsibly, needs to remember who they are talking about, what they are talking about, the people who work within it, and to do it respectfully and to do it accurately.
Burnham says it's 'shameful' politicians have put point-scoring ahead of fixing social care issue
Burnham says he wants to celebrate “the good in social care” before turning to the need for reform.
Turning to the problems, he says his generation of politicians is to blame.
How have we got to this position when it comes to the bad?
I think there’s only one group really to blame, and that’s my generation of politicians.
It’s almost 30 years since the Royal Commission on Social Care, 30 years. And in that time, what did Yvette say? Twenty-two reviews.
It’s a major dereliction of public duty that parliament has not faced up to this of all challenges, something so fundamental to life as this.
It’s shameful, to be honest that politicians have put point-scoring before fixing this issue.
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Burnham says he's 'overwhelmed' by skill of carers helping his dad, saying they should be 'best paid' people, not worse
Andy Burnham is speaking now.
In a reference to how he started campaing for social care reform almost two decades ago, he says it is good to see faces in the room “who’ve been on this journey with me for a long, a long time”.
He says he was meant to be speaking from a text. But he will deliver some of this off the cuff, because this is personal for him.
He refers to his father, who has dementia, and says he has learned so much from watching how he has been looked after.
When someone in your family is receiving care, you look at everything through new eyes, don’t you? You notice things that maybe you didn’t notice before because you watch it so closely and so carefully.
And I’ve just been really overwhelmed by their care, the skill in what they do, the professionalism.
And it’s humbling to watch them caring for someone else’s dad or someone else’s mum, if you think about that, bringing all of that to the care of someone else’s relative. It’s just an incredible thing, isn’t it?
To me, they should be the best paid people in society, not the worst.
'We can do difficult in this country,' Casey says, as she insists social care reform can happen
Casey says today she is launching her a “Big Conversation on Care”.
She says, although there have been 22 previous attempts to reform social care, she thinks this might be the first time the public have been involved in a wide-ranging conversation on what they want.
And she ends be referring to her experience working on homelessness during the pandemic.
Can I just remind everybody that nobody thought we could get everybody in off the streets?
But that did happens, she says.
So we can do difficult in this country and we can do it well.
Louise Casey is speaking now.
She says some of her asks on social care “are actually quite modest”. But some of her asks will be “not be quite so modest”, she says.
Cooper says this issue is personal to her because her mother in law has dementia.
She says, since she became an MP in 1997, there have been 22 different attempts to reform social care.
She goes on:
You can go further back than that because it was 50 years ago this year that Barbara Castle, as health and social services secretary, argued for stronger integration of the NHS and social care.
And we cannot keep walking away from this problem.
We cannot keep walking around the same circles because this is so important and that’s why it’s so welcome we have Baroness Louise Casey, who will be launching the Big Conversation to involve as many people across the country as part of the Independent Care Commission that she is leading.
She also pays tribute to Andy Burnham’s leadership.
Ultimately this we are here because of leadership and because of the leadership of our prime minister, Andy Burnham, who has been passionate about the need to reform social care for decades, who was arguing 15 years ago for major changes to deliver social care that provides proper dignity and support for families.
The Andy Burnham social care event is starting.
Yvette Cooper, the health secretary, is speaking first. She starts by thanking Jewish Care, the organisation hosting the event in north London this morning. She says Angela Rayner, the housing secretary, and Sarah Sackman, the local MP (Finchley and Golders Green) are there too.
She says they are also there “in solidarity with the Jewish community” . They have suffered “the most appalling antisemitic attacks and abuse”, she says.
In her interview on the Today programme, Louise Casey said that dementia was a “big hidden problem” in society.
She explained:
It is absolutely extraordinary to me that we do not recognise or see dementia within society, but also within the kind of public services.
It’s like it’s a big hidden problem. It’s the thing that we fear the most.
So the public fear dementia, and at the same time, it’s the largest killer.
And so I found it really interesting and really deeply troubling that we seem to have one system in the National Health Service for people that that don’t have dementia, but say have cancer or heart disease.
Andy Burnham has posted a video on social media about his desire to find “common ground” for social care reform. In it, he says he is “prepared to put everything I’ve got” behind this goal.
Casey says there is 'room for mixed market' in provision of social care, but not 'profiteering out of misery'
This morning the Times has splashed on a story saying “privately run nursing home chains face being cut out of a radical shake-up of social care in England to prevent taxpayers’ money being used to subsidise the profits of private equity”.
In their story, Oliver Wright and Eleanor Hayward report:
The Times understands that the prime minister is reluctant to allow the new service to be operated by large private sector providers for profit and wants to base the model around community-led services run by charities, local authorities and not-for-profit companies.
“He is coming at this from the principle that he does not want to see private sector firms making large profits over the provision of a vital public service,” a senior government source said. “The model is going to be more like the NHS or the Live Well scheme he pioneered in Manchester rather than the system we have at the moment.”
In her interview on the Today programme this morning, Louise Casey, the cross-bench peer and former civil servant leading the government’s commission on social care, said she thought there was “room for a mixed market” in the provision of social care. But she said she was opposed to “profiteering”.
She explained:
I don’t like the idea of profiteering out of human misery and human life. I object to that.
I’d object to it, whether it was homelessness you were asking me about, or whether it was anything else I’ve been responsible for.
In a separate interview on the programme, Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, gave a similar answer.
He said he has “no problem” with private providers making money from providing social care services. But he went on:
I do think, though, that we do see examples where some private companies have been making ridiculous amounts of money.
Asked what could be done about that, he said:
It’s an issue if we are wasting money, if we’re wasting taxpayers’ money, and people are paying way over the odds. So you do it in the normal way … you have regulation, you have rules, and I think this whole area has not been looked at properly.
Zack Polanski will not say sorry to Farage for sharing guillotine image
Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, has said he made an “inadvertent mistake” by sharing an Instagram post of a man wearing a T-shirt featuring an image of a guillotine and the phrase “we’re only making plans for Nigel”, but he repeatedly said he would not apologise to Nigel Farage. Aletha Adu has the story.
Burnham to give speech on social care as Louise Casey plays down cost concerns saying many families ‘already paying’
Good morning. Andy Burnham is this morning giving a speech on social care. He is not going to discuss in any detail at all the sort of reform to the system he wants to implement, but instead he will focus on his intention to build a political consensus on the changes needed. He will say:
For decades, governments have kicked this issue down the road because they’ve seen it as too risky, too difficult, and too complicated.
Politicians might have different views but I’m serious about fixing this issue and to do that, we have to find common ground and listen to others to find a way forward.
It’s time to draw a line under people playing politics when the human cost of that means carers struggling, families paying the price and our NHS buckling under the strain.
Pippa Crerar and Aletha Adu have the details in their overnight story.
Louise Casey, the veteran Whitehall official who for years has been deployed by governments of all parties to solve some of their most intractable problems, is already leading a commission on adult social care reform and she will be attending the event with Burnham too.
She is launching what she describes as a “Big Conversation on Care”, which is designed to “give the public their chance to share their views and help shape the future of adult social care in England”.
Burnham’s desire to find “common ground” on social care is undoubtedly sincere, but is already looking problematic. The No 10 news release says Burnham has “invited the leaders of the two main opposition parties, Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey” to a meeting today to discuss the issue. The meeting will go ahead, but neither Badenoch nor Davey will be there in person. Davey is in France, he has a son who needs care 24/7, and in a post on social media last night he explained that he would be joining the meeting via Zoom. Badenoch reportedly has a medical appointment, and she will be sending Stuart Andrew, the shadow health secretary, in her place.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has not been invited. Perhaps that is because his party has already decided what it thinks Burnham will propose (“a death tax”) and has spent the last few days promising to fight it “every step of the way”. But that has not stopped him complaining about being NFI’d. In a statement last night he said:
If Andy Burnham is serious about putting politics aside to solve Britain’s biggest problems, it’s remarkable that he’s chosen to ignore the party that led over 300 national opinion polls and represents thousands of councillors and millions of Britons across the country.
It’s now clear that Burnham is conspiring behind closed doors with the failed political establishment to foist further tax rises on the country.
The fact Ed Davey and Kemi Badenoch are going along with this tells you all you need to know about their parties. This is the uniparty in action.
Casey was on the Today programme this morning. While she did not set out in detail what sort of reform she would like to see, she condemned the way dementia is treated as a “hidden problem” by the health sector, because it is not prioritised in the way that cancer is, and she said services needed to be more joined up.
The vision that we must have for our country when it comes to a National Care Service is that the public do not have to face this constant battle lines between who does what and how … The vision, surely, is that we have something that basically is simple and straightforward, that the public know is going to be there.
On the question of funding, she also made the point that many families are already paying for adult social care.
Incidentally, they’re already paying for [care]. So this idea that somehow somebody’s going to come along and say, ‘Hello, here’s a whole new service and a whole new tax’ is just kind of cloud cuckoo land.
I will post more from her interview shortly.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: The Cabinet Office publishes annual figures on the civil service workforce.
Around 10am: Andy Burnham gives his speech on social care, and takes questions from journalists.
Afternoon: Burnham holds a meeting with the Tories and Lib Dems about social care.
Afternoon: Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, is on a visit in north London.
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