Burnham won’t rule out tax rises to fix England’s social care crisis

Andy Burnham has refused to rule out raising taxes to overhaul England’s crumbling social care system, as the prime minister convenes emergency cross-party talks aimed at fast-tracking a long-awaited national settlement on the issue.

Tax rises back on the table

The Greater Manchester mayor, widely seen as a future Labour leadership contender, said no option should be dismissed before a proper review has taken place. Speaking on Sunday morning television, Burnham stopped short of endorsing any specific mechanism but acknowledged that the scale of the funding gap — estimated by sector experts at somewhere between £8 billion and £14 billion annually — made difficult choices unavoidable. “You can’t solve this on the cheap,” he said. “People have been promised reform for decades and nothing has come. We need to be honest with the public about what it costs.”

That’s a significant shift in tone from a government that spent much of last year insisting there were no plans to increase the tax burden.

Prime minister accelerates review

Downing Street confirmed Sunday that the prime minister has asked for an interim set of recommendations from the social care review panel by the end of March, shaving roughly four months off the original timetable. The acceleration follows a damning report from the Care Quality Commission last autumn, which found that more than 1.5 million people in England are currently waiting for a social care needs assessment.

Cross-party talks are now scheduled for later this week, with senior figures from the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and smaller parties all invited to attend. It’s the first time in several years that a government has sought opposition buy-in at this early a stage of a policy process.

Why now?

The political pressure has been building for months. Local councils across England have been sounding the alarm over council tax precepts that were never designed to carry the full weight of adult social care. Thirteen councils have already issued financial distress notices in the current fiscal year alone. And winter brought its familiar knock-on crisis: delayed hospital discharges caused by a lack of care packages, costing the NHS an estimated £300 million between October and January.

Social care affects roughly 10 million people in England directly, whether as recipients, unpaid family carers or paid workers.

What comes next

The review panel is expected to look at a range of funding models, including a hypothecated social care levy similar to the one briefly introduced under Boris Johnson before being scrapped, a national insurance adjustment targeting higher earners, and an insurance-based model popular in parts of northern Europe. None are without controversy. But there’s a growing sense inside Westminster that the window for real reform is narrower than it looks, and that another parliament can’t be allowed to pass without a concrete answer.

If the cross-party talks produce even a framework agreement this spring, it would mark the most significant progress on social care funding in England in a generation. Whether that framework includes a tax rise remains, for now, an open question.