Andy Burnham opens door to tax rises to pay for social care overhaul

Andy Burnham has signalled he is willing to raise taxes to pay for a better elderly care system, saying that England’s current set-up is “as unfair as American healthcare”.

The UK prime minister said on Wednesday that he wanted to stop people having to sell their homes to pay for care, adding that reform would “require difficult decisions” on funding.

“If everybody on the NHS principle contributed a little, it would mean everyone could protect the majority of what they’d worked for,” he said, as he vowed he would not be deterred by “screaming headlines” about tax rises.

Labour has enjoyed a bounce in opinion polls since Burnham took over as prime minister last week. However, social care has long been one of the thorniest issues for UK politicians to tackle, with 22 failed attempts to reform the system in the past 30 years.

Burnham, who has said he is willing to spend “political capital” on the issue, on Wednesday positioned the overhaul of social care as a “test” of his premiership.

“I think social care in England is as unfair as American healthcare,” he said. “The vulnerable pay with everything, and it can completely leave them with nothing . . . common sense says that can’t be fair.”

The prime minister said he was asking Baroness Louise Casey, a longstanding government adviser, to bring forward a review on social care to next year as she began a large-scale “conversation” with voters on how to create a better system.

Burnham also said he wanted to pay social care workers a rate closer to that of NHS staff, bemoaning “poverty pay” in the sector.

The social care sector has suffered from chronic staff shortages for years as a result of funding pressures that have led to low pay, poor conditions and limited career progression.

Despite the closure of the post-Brexit visa route for care workers, providers are still heavily reliant on international recruitment, hiring 30,000 newly arrived migrants in 2025-26.

Noting how many people from foreign countries are caring for his father, who has dementia, Burnham said: “I want those carers to know we appreciate you, we appreciate what you are doing to support people here.”

He added that he would not exclude private care companies from the system but said it was essential to prevent “profiteering”, pointing to groups that take out money through “unnecessary and dangerous cost-cutting”.

Burnham said that, as well as raising pay for workers, he wanted to see more older people receive help. There are currently 1.9mn people who have needs that do not meet eligibility criteria for state-funded care.

He also said he wanted to protect people from catastrophic bills that wiped out their savings, with an estimated one in seven facing care costs of more than £100,000. People with assets of more than £23,250 receive no state help.

Burnham described ageing as a “roulette wheel”.

“It needs to be recognised that people can see everything they’ve worked for wiped out by the cost of care. Hundreds of thousands of pounds can just disappear paying for care,” he said.

“In an ideal world, I wouldn’t want anybody to have to sell their home to pay for care,” he added. “I think it’s a really awful process for those who live through it.”

In a sign that the prime minister still favours a centrally funded national care service free at the point of use, he said he would explore how to create such a system over time.

“You could do the fully fledged version or you could do a lesser version and you could do something in between, and then you have the question of how you pay for all of those options,” he said.

Previous attempts to reform social care have foundered on concerns about who will pay, including Burnham’s own previous attempt as health secretary in 2010, when a plan for a levy on estates was dubbed a “death tax”.

He said he had learnt that reforms should be tried well before an election and insisted he wanted cross-party agreement on the issue.

“You can have as many headlines as you like about this tax or something else,” Burnham said. “But when people are losing hundreds of thousands of pounds, everything they work for, well, what about them?”