The prime minister Andy Burnham has announced that Louise Casey’s review into social care will be brought forward by one year to summer 2027.
In a speech during a visit to a care home in north London, Burnham said: “We ideally want to do it even sooner, but we’ve got to be realistic. But if we say a year from now that we have that independent review, then I think we can rise to this challenge with the urgency it requires.”
Burnham said he has also asked Baroness Casey to address the need for a National Care Service as part of the review, "because we need to talk about a system that can become highly integrated with the NHS".
The PM said that he thinks “social care in England is as unfair as American healthcare – the vulnerable pay with everything and it can completely leave them with nothing”.
Asked how his government would fund social care reform, Burnham said he thinks “more is possible from within existing resources” and “several billion pounds a year is lost from the lack of a preventative front-end social care service that’s well supported”. He pledged to address these problems “before we talk about tax rises”.
The PM also said he wants to, before the review reports, immediately look at "uplifting" the social care workforce "to integrate it more with the NHS workforce" and start to think of them "as one workforce".
"We will not get the care service we all want until we improve the strength and the capability of care at the very front of the service, and that means lifting up the social care workforce as best as we can – yes in terms of pay, but also in terms of training and the wider support we give them, and that is the commitment I'm giving today," he added. "That is an essential enabler of the reform that we wish to see."
As part of his plans to reform social care, Burnham has invited the leaders of the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats to meet with him to drive cooperation on this issue across party lines.
Speaking alongside Burnham this morning, Casey said some of her asks on social care will be “actually quite modest”, while others will “not be quite so modest”.
Casey noted that the success of the pandemic-era "Everyone In" initiative to get rough sleepers into accommodation, spearheaded by a Rough Sleeping Taskforce that she ran, showed "we can do difficult in this country and we can do it well.”
The former senior civil servant also announced the launch of a public consultation on social care – the Big Conversation on Care.
Also speaking at the North London care home, health and social care secretary Yvette Cooper noted there have been 22 different attempts to reform social care since she became an MP in 1997, adding that “you can go further back than that because it was 50 years ago this year that Barbara Castle, as health and social services secretary, argued for stronger integration of the NHS and social care”.
“We cannot keep walking away from this problem," she said.
Cooper said she will chair a new ministerial group to accelerate the government’s response on social care, including workforce issues, system reforms and delivery of the commission’s first recommendations. This will include appointing a dementia tsar later this summer.