A new Prime Minister has made social care his mission, and the talks are cross-party. Britain has answered this question four times since 1999. The answer was never the missing piece. The cheque was.
Crossbencher · 02 August 2026
The new government has picked its defining mission, and it's a serious one. Andy Burnham has put social care at the centre of his first weeks in office and opened talks with the other parties to settle it for good. The instinct is sound. The diagnosis behind it isn't. Britain doesn't have a social care question it can't answer. It has an answer it won't pay for, and the record on that point now runs to twenty-seven years.
Start in 1999. The Royal Commission on Long Term Care, established by the incoming Labour government, looked at the means test that still governs the system today and found that relying on income and savings was neither efficient nor fair for a risk of that size. It proposed pooling the risk. The government took the cheap recommendation, free nursing care, and rejected the central one, free personal care, citing its very substantial cost.
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