Andy Burnham has done something Westminster doesn’t see nearly enough of: he’s picked up the phone to the other lot.
The Greater Manchester mayor and Labour stalwart has extended a formal invitation to both Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians to join cross-party talks on social care reform, a move that signals he’s more interested in actually fixing things than in winning the argument.
It comes ahead of a speech from the Prime Minister in which Keir Starmer is expected to argue that solving the social care crisis, one of the most expensive and tangled problems in British public life, will require politicians to park their differences and get on with it.
Burnham has long championed the idea of a National Care Service, modelled loosely on the NHS, and he’s not shy about the scale of the problem. Around 1.5 million people in England are currently waiting for a social care needs assessment. The workforce is chronically underpaid, with care workers earning an average of just £11.50 an hour. And councils are routinely raiding other budgets just to keep care services afloat.
“This can’t be a party political football any more,” Burnham said, in comments echoing his long-held position that social care reform has been kicked down the road by every government since at least the 2011 Dilnot Commission.
The Lib Dems have historically been sympathetic to cross-party working on care, and their 2024 manifesto called for a dedicated ring-fenced funding settlement. The Tories, for their part, backed Andrew Dilnot’s reforms in principle back in 2022 before quietly shelving the lifetime care cost cap just months before it was due to come in.
Whether either party will take Burnham up on the offer remains to be seen. Opposition politicians have every incentive to let the government own both the problem and the blame.
But with the number of unpaid family carers in the UK estimated at around 5.7 million, and the NHS increasingly buckling under patients who can’t be discharged for lack of care provision, the political calculus might finally be shifting.
The real question isn’t whether everyone agrees social care is broken. It’s whether anyone is brave enough to actually say what fixing it will cost.
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