Ben Chu

speaker

290 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 17 Aug

Ben Chu’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Newscast · What is Andy Burnham's Plan to 'Fix' Social Care? · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

So that's another way.

And then you could go, well, let's just say what people get for free.

So go to down the Scottish route, for example, and say people get free personal care or say really ambitious and national care service.

So basically, it's like the NHS free at the point of use.

Now, full credit to the Health Foundation because they've done some kind of really good costings of these proposals.

They estimate to do the cap on what people have to pay over the lifetime of £86,000 would cost in today's money around an extra £4 billion a year.

So this is on top of that £30 billion I mentioned earlier.

So it costs a bit of money.

It's not revolutionary.

That may be the kind of organic thing that the government could do.

to do the three scottish system free personal care guarantee they estimate in england that would cost another seven and a half billion pounds a year in total spending and to go full-on nhs style care system that's really quite significant that's about 18 and a half billion pounds according to the health foundations calculations extra a year on top of the 30 billion so they're the kind of

pay for a bit well what you kind of described the second option is what we kind of have at the moment because the state does step in but only when you're you've got used up most of your money so it's there is state support and it's relatively significant in terms of the overall cost but it's not enough it doesn't meet people's expectations so what in terms of what allison's saying in the big conversation we do need to decide as a nation what we are what we think is fair

And then we need to decide how we are going to fund it and how we think it's a fair way to fund it as well.

So this is why it's founded attempts over the past 20, 15 years is because we've not got that clear as a society, as a country on those issues.

It is worth bearing in mind, Adam, that the way that the care is delivered in terms of, as Alison was saying, local authorities commissioning these private independent providers to provide it is very different from the NHS system, obviously, where it's sort of a state-run system.

You can imagine, though, the cost implications of putting care workers on a similar status to NHS workers in terms of their ability to push for higher pay.

Now, that may well be a sensible thing to do in the long term to keep costs down for all the reasons we've been discussing.

But you can imagine concerns in the Treasury of putting this permanent workforce in a kind of putting them on a par with NHS workers in terms of the costs there.

So I've been talking about the cost of kind of delivering it in the current system to do a complete overhaul.

And as I say, put them on a par with NHS workers, the cost will be even higher.

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