Andy Burnham used his first speech as Prime Minister to promise he would win over voters “fed up with politics” and show the world that the UK can once again be a source of stability.
Burnham used his address in Downing Street to promise to take power out of Westminster and give the public greater control over “life’s essentials”. He said he would set out a 10-year plan later this year and, from Tuesday, introduce measures to ease the cost-of-living squeeze and give people “breathing space now”.
In his first promise as Prime Minister, he said he would “end rough sleeping in our country”.
The Labour leader pledged to make the moment “a circuit breaker for Britain”, promising the biggest transformation in 40 years.
‘Grasp the Nettle’ on Social Care
Among the challenges awaiting Burnham is one he has wrestled with before: adult social care reform in England, an issue he has vowed to “grasp the nettle” on as Prime Minister.
Speaking after being formally declared Labour leader on Friday, Burnham said England’s “broken social care system” is “the worst of all worlds” and called it a “massive” priority for the public. A health charity has warned his words will be “a benchmark against which his government will be measured”.
Burnham’s own history with the issue runs deep. His plans in 2010 to create a national care service for England were turned against Labour by the Conservatives, who claimed they would levy a “death tax” to pay for it. “The minute that poster landed with the gravestones, that was it. My reforms were dead,” he later admitted.
He has now pledged to “expend political capital” during his premiership on what he called a long-neglected sector, accusing Westminster of having “flinched” from such big decisions for too long. Name-checking the issue in his first speech as Labour leader, at a special conference in London on Friday, he said: “Let’s take a problem-solving rather than a point-scoring approach. Let’s have the courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected, like social care, and have the conviction to go out there together and argue for our plans.”
A System Governments Have Failed to Fix
How adult social care works and is funded in England has been a thorny issue for successive governments. Unlike NHS care, social care is not free at the point of use, and high costs sometimes force people to sell their homes to pay for what they need. People with savings worth more than £23,250 are not entitled to help with the cost of care from their local council.
Baroness Louise Casey, who is leading an independent review into the sector and is expected to publish her first report later this year, said in a speech earlier this month that there have been no fewer than 22 attempts since 1997 to reform the sector, none of which had “fixed the foundations”.
In 2019, in his own first speech as prime minister, Boris Johnson said the Conservatives would “fix the crisis in social care once and for all” — a pledge that was never fulfilled. Labour, too, faced criticism after being elected in 2024 for scrapping plans for an £86,000 cap on the amount anyone in England would need to spend on personal care over their lifetime, having argued the proposals were not “deliverable” in the time frame.
