Andy Burnham’s father Roy unaware of son becoming prime minister due to Alzheimer’s

Andy Burnham’s Alzheimer’s-stricken father Roy doesn’t know his son will be the next prime minister.

Mr Burnham said Times His father has no idea that he will start working on Monday.

“It’s a sadness because it’s [proud]” said the new prime minister.

“From my perspective, this is his success too. Even if he doesn’t know it, it’s the success of the whole family.”

Mr Burnham vowed to “take a breath” in reforming the adult social care system by drawing on his father’s experience.

He said his father was also unaware that Mr. Burnham was behind a change to proportional representation in the voting system, one of Roy’s political ambitions.

He said: “Because of his situation, I don’t think he realizes that I came into PR, which is one of his duties, to get me to agree to this.”

Mr Burnham said the family, including his youngest daughter, visited his father last Sunday.

“We were at his care home. My two brothers were there, my mother was there too. So the five of us were together, which was nice.”

Reforming the social care system is unfinished business for Mr Burnham, who laid out plans for change when he was health secretary under Gordon Brown.

Mr Burnham described the “broken social care system” in England as the “worst in the world” and said it was a “huge” priority for the public.

The Prime Minister, who will take up his post in Number 10 on Monday, acknowledged reform “will require something difficult” after his efforts failed more than a decade ago.

In 2010, plans to overhaul social care for the elderly by creating a national care service for England were turned against Labor by the Conservatives, who claimed they would introduce a “death tax” to pay for it.

Mr Burnham later admitted: “The moment the poster dropped with the tombstones, that was it. My reforms were dead.”

He has now vowed to “spend political capital” on a sector long neglected during his premiership and accused Westminster of “avoiding” such big decisions for too long.

Name-checking the issue in his first speech after officially replacing Sir Keir Starmer as Labor leader, he told a special conference in London on Friday: “Let’s take the problem-solving approach rather than scoring points.

“Let’s have the courage to fix the big problems that politics has neglected, like social care, and let’s have the conviction to get out there together and argue for our plans.”

How adult social care works and is funded in England has been a thorny issue for many governments over the years.

Unlike NHS care, social care is not free at the point of use, and high costs sometimes mean people are forced to sell their homes to meet their needs.

People with a savings value of more than £23,250 are not entitled to help with maintenance costs from their local council.

Baroness Louise Casey, who is leading an independent review into the sector and is due to publish its first report later this year, said in a speech earlier this month that there had been at least 22 attempts to reform the sector since 1997, none of which had “solidified the foundations”.

In his first speech as prime minister in 2019, Boris Johnson said the Conservatives would “solve the crisis in social care permanently”, but this did not happen.

Labor faced criticism after the party was elected in 2024 for scrapping plans for an £86,000 cap on the amount everyone in England will spend on personal care over their lifetime, suggesting the proposals were not “deliverable” within the time frame.

After becoming Labor leader on Friday, Mr Burnham spoke of his family’s own experience of the system because his father has Alzheimer’s.

“I think it’s about being prepared to grasp the nettle,” he said.

“I have personal experience of the system. My father has Alzheimer’s and you see what the staff have to endure. It’s not their fault. The system is broken.”

“You can’t leave social care like that.”

He said reform “will take a hard thing” but believes the public wants a better system.

He added: “The NHS will not get back to where it needs to be when you have a broken social care system that cannot keep people out of hospital.

“This is a huge thing when it comes to things people care about.

“And I won’t do what Westminster traditionally does, which is throw away this important issue.

“I will spend political capital and waste no time to put forward a plan to fix social care because as we waste another year, thousands and thousands more people don’t get the care they need.”

He said the system as it stands has people “paying for care in the most unfair way possible” and likened it to “the American healthcare system.”

Mr Burnham said: “The more vulnerable you are the more you pay, so it’s the worst of all worlds and people lose everything they’ve worked for.

“So you start from there and then you look at options for how you create a universal social care system, because I believe in it, a national care service, how do you fund that? And we’ll get to those options in due course.”

Speaking before becoming an MP in May, Mr Burnham said he had “not backed down” from previous comments he made in favor of abolishing inheritance tax and maintaining a care tax.