John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.
The striking thing about Andy Burnham’s announcement on social care is not the policy detail, but his engagement with it at all.
For several decades now, funding care has been marked “here be dragons” on maps of the British political landscape. The spectrum of answers is obvious: a fully private system makes your last years a lottery, while a fully state-funded system would add a significant burden to the taxpayer. In between lies a whole range of potential solutions, each with costs and benefits, winners and losers.
The challenge is not how to solve the problem, but how to make it politically palatable.
Repeated commissions have pointed to these options. Politicians have baulked at making them happen. Theresa May sought to break the deadlock in the 2017 election. Her plans became a millstone around her campaign and a cautionary tale about touching the issue. The “dementia tax” formed part of the trajectory that took her from dominating British politics to limping over the line with a minority government. Few would look at that example and think the issue is one to stake your political fortunes on.
Yet the new Prime Minister has.
By engaging with this so publicly, so early in his term, it has become a de facto centrepiece of his ministry. It is understandable why. His own time as Health Secretary shaped his political development and the centrality of social care to a functioning health system. Solving the funding issue is also important for his devolution agenda. The current system effectively makes councils a social care service which occasionally empties bins and maybe runs a library. Shifting the cost of local care is an essential first step towards empowering councils and improving people’s doorsteps. The nettle-grabbing is also a way to distinguish himself from the caution and indecision of the Starmer years.
Burnham has tried to mitigate the risk of this approach by calling for cross-party co-operation. He wants the Conservatives and Lib Dems inside the tent on this, contributing to a solution. It is easy to see this as a trap. After all, the Labour Party controls the government and has a large majority. Cross-party consultation could mean little more than being pressganged to endorse a Labour plan. That in turn becomes a double-edged sword. Agree to something, and we bear part of the burden of its unpopularity. Reject it, and we potentially look like spoilers.
There are, however, real upsides to properly contributing to Labour plans for social care.
Firstly, we should want this solved as much as they do. The current system fails both the state and those who need care. We have known for a long time that it is not working but have lacked the ingenuity and will to solve it. Getting a solution in place, even an imperfect one, could free up time to address other issues the UK faces.
Similarly, we need to accept that if Labour do get a plan through, it will likely be set in place for a long time. Social care has remained unaddressed because none of the options are politically palatable. They all create immediate losers, and only hypothetical winners. No government in the near future will have the political capital or the incentive to revisit a finalised plan, for the same reason that few have wanted to press on with one in the last couple of decades. If Burnham implements something, we are very unlikely to tear it up.
There is another advantage, too. Rarely in Opposition does a party get to show that it is serious about governing, and how it will balance the trade-offs of power. One of the costs of losing elections is that you must sit aside and watch things happen. The best you can hope for is slowing down a policy or forcing a U-turn. This is often piecemeal, tied to the vagaries of the press, and only operates negatively. An invitation to make policy can be a rare boon.
It does not mean we will be able to create our ideal policy. Being out of power prohibits that. But it does allow the Conservatives to shape it in some way. Judicious contributions could produce a settlement that works better for our voters and aligns with our broader strategies for government. We are going to have to live with Burnham’s plan for a while and shape our future government around the taxation and spending commitments it makes, in the same way we have had to govern around a Labour settlement on health care since 1948.
The cross-party initiative also comes at an opportune time. Reform are wracked by serious scandals. The party has lost momentum, and there are real questions about their probity. There is an implicit question running through all this: “Do you really trust them to govern?”
In 2024, the Conservatives faced the same question, and the answer was “no”. It potentially cost us our position as the dominant party of the right. But Farage’s party is weak on this too, and pushing them when they are already falling could help re-establish our position as a party that gets stuff done rather than chirping negatively.
Social care is an issue that matters to a lot of right-leaning voters. That is partly why it cost us so dearly in 2017. Voters in their 50s and 60s worry about both their own care and that of their parents. Those who have built a lifetime of savings and housing equity see how quickly care costs can consume it. Being part of the solution on this could help to restore the party’s reputation for serious policymaking.
At a moment where Reform looks vulnerable, it could be a real way of regaining our momentum on the right.
As part of this, we should be clear on what solutions we want. We should push for a settlement that reflects not just the present crisis, but the future one. The social care question is not getting easier. Over the coming years, more people will live longer and with more expensive medical conditions – many will be worse off than current generations who built large home equity and good pensions. We should be the party insisting reform is measured against the demographic curve rather than the next spending review.
Any plan must leave real room for private and voluntary provision, not fold care into a fully nationalised service answering to Whitehall. The state can guarantee a floor of support without owning every hand that delivers it, and a mixed market has proven better at flexibility and innovation than a monopoly provider ever has. Neither of these are a wrecking position, but pushes towards a settlement we can continue to work with after the current government has left power.
Social care has sat in the “too hard” pile of British politics for a long time now.
It is not enough for a new PM to say he wants to fix it. Burnham’s premiership will now be defined by his follow through. The Conservatives have to decide if and how they want to be part of that. The PM is, of course, savvy enough for this not to be a purely non-partisan offer. He wants to portray us as either part of his answer, or as petulant wreckers.
With the right strategy, however, we could nudge towards a care system that is more tolerable to us, and in doing so defuse the risk of having to deal with it from scratch when we get into power.