By Cai Parry - Labour List

This week, the Prime Minister stood up and did something incredibly brave; something refreshing, I may add. In his second week in the job, he pledged to fix social care.

Social care is the issue that brought me into politics. Having grown up as a young, unpaid carer for my father, I joined the Labour Party after coalition and Tory austerity punched down on families like mine. It gutted the financial support available to us, and failed to address the scandalous state of the social care system across the UK. Fast-forward a bit, and I now work advocating for social care reform full-time for a national charity, alongside serving as a councillor in Surrey.

Of course, social care is not a new issue, and it’s not just been the failure of Conservatives to tackle the issue once and for all. The sad thing is that we, as a whole, know what we need to do to fix the system. We’ve had dozens of reports and inquiries since the Sutherland Commission of 1999, all with their own focuses and proposals; however, few have even been implemented.

READ MORE: Time to care

And that’s because most of the electorate are very fortunate, and I envy them, in that they’ve never had to deal with the social care system first-hand. When you put social care reform side-by-side with tax cuts or the triple lock, most people will opt for the latter, especially when the media use terms like “death tax” or “dementia tax” more latterly, to seal the public’s scepticism. But as our population ages and lives with more chronic health problems for longer, more people are discovering just how urgently we need to tackle this issue.

It’s estimated that one in six people now provide unpaid care to loved ones, and two million people have unmet needs through dwindling funding to councils and changes to eligibility criteria for NHS funding. Most, of course, will have to pay for their own care at the moment until their homes have been sold and their money spent: a lifetime’s savings gone. Often overlooked are those of working-age who need social care, who often have greater need and rely on fighting with their councils – and the DWP – to get it.

Become a friend of LabourList and join our community. Our friends support our vital non-factional work and get access to exclusive content and events. 

Today we almost worship our NHS. On both the left and right of mainstream politics, we couldn’t imagine a country without it. It’s easy to forget just how much of a struggle it was to build. In 1946, Nye Bevan was told it would be too expensive and would limit patients’ choice. Letters to the British Medical Journal called him a ‘Medical Führer’ and the President of the BMA, Bernard Docker, accused the government of ‘mass murder’. The fact was that the Labour Party was willing to face up to the sensationalised coverage around its plan for a healthier nation, tackling the issues outlined by a historic report by William Beveridge.

In 2026, we face an issue now that far fewer did in the ‘40s; however, the discussion around it really hasn’t changed much. Reform UK promised to fight the PM’s proposals “all the way” and reheated the “death tax” threats before Andy Burnham even had a chance to say that a dialogue with the public would inform the way forward, drawing on what they expect from care and how they were willing to pay for it. 

The PM spoke yesterday alongside Baroness Louise Casey, who, if the political will endures, will be social care’s Beveridge. She launched the “Big Conversation” on care, the responses from which will form the basis of her accelerated Commission on social care, which will now report next year, allowing Labour to get work started before social care gets lost in yet another election campaign, where inevitably carers and those who draw upon care will be told “it’s just not possible to fix right now.”

The Prime Minister was right when he said to the BBC’s Chris Mason during his 2015 leadership campaign:

“The experience for me of trying to reform social care twice now, once before 2010 and another time before 2015, brings me into this race because there is no way the modern Labour Party could have created the NHS. Because I believe it has lost the ability to think big. […] It’s the way politics has gone.”

I think that over a decade later, that still sums up what is the driving force behind Andy Burnham’s premiership. It outlines what he thinks is wrong with politics, how it has changed for the worse over the 80 years since the NHS was formed. It’s through the courage he must have to fix social care, to accelerate the timetable for its reform, that shows just how serious he is about restoring faith in it once again.