UK PM Burnham announces plans for social care reform

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham and UK Health Secretary Yvette Cooper visited Jewish Care in North London on Wednesday.

There Burnham relaunched his years-long bid to create a national service to tackle a UK crisis in the care of elderly and vulnerable adults. He previously proposed a national care service when he was health minister from 2009 to 2010 under former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

According to Burnham, successive governments had failed to tackle reform of social care, seeing it as "too difficult" and politically risky. Total expenditure on adult social care in England in 2024 reached £34.5 billion, up from £28.4 billion in 2021, figures from the King's Fund think tank showed.