Burnham did not rule out tax rises to fund a new scheme as part of efforts to overhaul Britain’s social care system
2-MIN READ2-MIN ListenReutersPublished: 10:47pm, 29 Jul 2026Updated: 10:47pm, 29 Jul 2026British Prime Minister Andy Burnham pledged on Wednesday to take difficult decisions to overhaul England’s adult social care system, saying he wanted to work with other parties to end unfair high costs for users that he likened to US healthcare.
Successive governments have failed to reform adult social care, for which families can pay hundreds of thousands of pounds, after previous proposals were defeated by opposition parties who dubbed them a “dementia tax” or “death tax”.
Burnham did not rule out tax rises to fund a new scheme and said that “scare stories” from newspaper headlines would not deter him from tackling a situation that will only get worse as the population ages.
“It’s a major dereliction of public duty that parliament has not faced up to this,” he told an audience at a care home in north London.
Asked if he could transform social care without raising taxes, he said that more was possible within existing resources, but some of the plans “will require difficult decisions”.
“We will be honest with people about those,” he said, adding that he would stick to a manifesto commitment not to raise certain personal taxes.
