UK's new PM, Burnham, promises to use 'political capital' to tackle social care

LONDON, July 20 - Britain's new prime minister, Andy Burnham, said on Monday he did not want to leave office having failed to tackle the nation's social care crisis, pledging to "use some of my political capital" on an issue close to his heart.

Speaking to reporters just hours after he entered his new Downing Street office, Burnham spoke about his father having Alzheimer's disease and how often those people who should be looked after in a social care setting were using an already stretched public health service for help.

Burnham, a former mayor of Greater Manchester in northwestern England, has long spoken of the need to reform social care and find ways to pay for it, saying while governments have prevaricated on the issue, many older people have "lost their homes and their savings" to pay for care.

"I think the country needs to step back here and say, 'How have we let a situation kind of just roll on, where we know it's a major issue, and yet no one's got the courage to fix it?' I just think that's quite damning ... of my generation of politicians," he said.

Burnham, who first tried to reform the funding of social care when he was health minister under Gordon Brown's premiership, said he did not want to repeat what governments had done for "as close to 30 years" of ducking the issue.

Social care, unlike the state-run National Health Service, is not free for most people, and successive prime ministers have looked at measures, including providing caps on its cost, but struggled to win support for what would be a pricey policy.

"It's not defensible," he said. "We need to face it and fix it." REUTERS