Badenoch says PM must rule out tax rises to fund social care reform

Kemi Badenoch has done something rather unusual for an opposition leader: she’s offered to help the government. The catch? Keir Starmer has to promise not to put his hand in the public’s pocket to pay for it.

In a letter sent directly to the Prime Minister, the Conservative leader said she’s willing to work across the aisle on adult social care reform, one of the most stubborn and politically toxic problems in British public life. But she’s made her cooperation conditional on a guarantee that any overhaul won’t be funded through tax rises.

“Adult social care is a challenge that has defeated government after government,” Badenoch wrote, framing her offer as one of genuine cross-party goodwill rather than political point-scoring. Whether Number 10 sees it that way is another matter entirely.

The timing is pointed. Starmer’s government has been quietly wrestling with how to reform a social care system that currently costs England alone roughly £22 billion a year, a figure set to balloon as the population ages. The previous Conservative government’s own attempts, including Boris Johnson’s now-shelved care cost cap, collapsed under the weight of competing priorities and a chaotic political period.

Badenoch’s letter essentially puts Labour in a bind. Accepting the offer risks legitimising Tory conditions on policy. Rejecting it hands the Conservatives a ready-made attack line: that Labour prefers partisanship over fixing a broken system.

Social care reform has a habit of making politicians look either cowardly or naive. The costs are enormous, the need is urgent, and the public’s appetite for higher taxes to fund it is, to put it generously, limited. A 2023 YouGov poll found only 38% of Britons supported raising income tax specifically to fund social care.

Badenoch is clearly gambling that Starmer won’t be able to resist the political optics of turning down a cross-party olive branch. It’s a shrewd move, even if the sincerity of it will be debated for weeks.

The real question is whether either party has the stomach to finally settle this, or whether adult social care reform will remain, as it has for two decades, the policy that every government promises and none delivers.