For the second week of Andy Burnham’s policy lollapalooza, the freshly minted Prime Minister has set as his theme ‘chronic headaches’.
These are the seemingly intractable issues that successive governments have tried and failed to tackle. Yesterday the focus was on those pesky NEETs, and today it’s social care in England.
If you don’t have direct experience of English social care – first of all, lucky you. But here’s the situation: those with savings of more than £23,250 must pay all their costs, whether that’s a care home or at-home support.
And that’s a strict threshold. Less than £23,250 means you can access support from your local council; a pound more means you get nothing.
So, people will blast through their savings until they reach the threshold where the council can help them. Or they’ll sell off valuable assets, such as their home. Or they’ll try and suffer as long as possible without the help they need.
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Burnham said today that social care in England is ‘as unfair as American healthcare’. Condemnations don’t come much stronger than that.
He also said he was prepared to wear through as much ‘political capital’ as necessary to get it sorted.
Those of you who are uninitiated may be wondering what that means. Surely fixing such a twisted state of affairs would only result in plaudits and electoral glory? Why would he need to worry about sacrificing goodwill?
Well, if it was easy then someone else would have done it before. And there’s been no shortage of attempts.
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Tony Blair’s government first appointed a Royal Commission to look into social care in 1997, and its report was published in 1999. Since then, no fewer than 22 further reviews, reports and commissions have emerged without any success.
To see why, let’s look at just two of them.
When Theresa May called a snap general election in 2017, the Tory manifesto proposed raising the asset threshold for someone getting care at home to £100,000 – but, for the first time, counting the value of their home in that total.
The Labour Party dubbed it a ‘dementia tax’, and the backlash has been credited with losing May her parliamentary majority. (She could tell you a fair bit about wearing through political capital.)
Then, there was the effort in 2010 from Gordon Brown’s health secretary, a man called Andy Burnham. He set out plans to create a National Care Service, which could be paid for with a new 10% levy on people’s estates after they died.
The Tories dubbed it a ‘death tax’, and released an advert featuring a grave with ‘R.I.P. OFF’ written on it and a dying red rose on top. Labour went on to lose that year’s election.
Today, Burnham said: ‘What I got wrong was going too close to a general election, when there just wasn’t time for those issues to breathe.’
The truth is that this is an enormously sensitive subject, and any solution will require a great deal of money at a time when things are already very tight. People may back the premise but, as ever, they may balk when they face the trade-offs.
New polls suggest the Burnham bounce is real for Labour – but has he just broached the topic that’ll leave it dribbling away?
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