Jenrick urges Burnham to rule out tax rises to fund social care

Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick has urged PM Andy Burnham to rule out future tax rises to fund his plans to fix adult social care in England.

Burnham has said he wants to look at existing budgets before considering tax rises but he has not ruled them out, adding that “difficult decisions” lay ahead with funding options to be set out in a review being published next year.

Jenrick said any reforms should be paid for by cutting foreign aid and benefit payments for migrants, urging the prime minister to rule out what he called a universal “death tax”.

Burnham was health secretary in a Gordon Brown government which proposed a compulsory levy which people could defer until after they had died.

The idea was labelled a “death tax” by the Conservative Party.

Burnham has not mentioned introducing an adult social care levy in this form.

He told reporters on Wednesday that proposals he put forward in 2009 were intended to stop people having to sell their home in order to pay for their care.

The new prime minister has said fixing the social care system was a top priority and he has speeded up a review of the system by Baroness Casey, which will now be published next summer.

He said the review should consider how to pay for a national care service, adding that there needed to be a system in place that becomes “highly integrated” with the NHS.

He said he would immediately start to examine, with Chancellor John Healey, how to boost the pay and training of care workers, something he said would be “fully funded” from existing budgets.

On paying for the wider shake-up of the system, he said he wanted to extract more from existing budgets “before we talk about tax rises”.

Speaking at a press conference earlier today, Jenrick said: “He won’t, he can’t, he will not rule out a death tax.”

The former Tory minister, who is now Reform’s Treasury spokesman, called on Burnham to “rule out this tax, end the uncertainty, end the worry today”.

He said he agreed with Burnham that care workers were “scandalously underpaid” and said a Reform government would stop visas for overseas workers in order to employ more British citizens.

And he said Reform would find the money to fix social care by cutting waste and raiding the foreign aid budget.

“I could not look the British taxpayer in the eye and impose a tax – another tax – before I had stopped sending taxpayers’ money to rich countries overseas,” he said.

The Conservatives have also called on the prime minister to rule out tax rises and further borrowing to pay for social care.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch wrote to Burnham earlier this week that “any solution to the issues around social care must also be fair to those who have made provisions and saved up over the course of their lives”.

Jenrick’s speech comes a day after Burnham held talks with Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey and shadow health secretary Stuart Andrew as part of efforts to secure cross-party support for any changes. Badenoch was unavailable.

Reform and the Green Party were not invited for talks. Both parties expressed disappointment at this.

Jenrick said he was “not surprised” Reform leader Nigel Farage had not been asked to attend.

“Andy Burnham knows that Nigel will never go along with the betrayal of people who’ve paid in all their lives,” he said.

He insisted that Reform were serious about health and social care, despite not having a health spokesperson.

“We are absolutely at the coalface of this, trying to do our utmost to support people in difficult times. Don’t tell us we don’t care about this issue. We really do.”

Adult social care provides state support to help people live more independently, but it has proved a complex issue to tackle for successive governments.

Unlike the NHS, social care is not free at the point of use. In England and Northern Ireland, people with savings worth more than £23,250 are not entitled to help with care costs from their council.

In Wales and Scotland, different rules apply in terms of eligibility.