Andy Burnham is right that the NHS will not recover while social care is left as it is.

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But the missing piece is not money alone, and it is not a timeline. He has spent nine years running the one part of England where health and social care were put under a single roof. The lesson from that is worth more to him now than any new commission.

I should declare an interest. I spent twenty-five years in the NHS as a clinician and now run a health technology company in Manchester. Therefore I have watched this from both sides.

I’ve seen patients waiting for someone to establish what care they were already receiving, from whom, and under what plan. That information existed - but it sat in another organisation's system, in a format nobody else could read. We call this a bed crisis. Much of it is a filing problem, although we have been treating it as though it were a building problem for thirty years.

In April 2016, Greater Manchester became the first English region to take control of its........

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