Barely a week into the job, Andy Burnham can perhaps be forgiven not fully comprehending the scale of the challenges he has inherited.

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Yet one is left puzzled when he announces schemes whose rationale can hardly be justified, and whose costs have not been fully estimated. Perhaps, if he lacked a clear plan for funding a new policy agenda, he should not have pushed Keir Starmer out of Downing Street.

The National Care Service is the latest such scheme – and it will not work.

Essentially, the Prime Minister wants to make social care work as the NHS does – that is, social care should be provided free at the point of need rather than based on the size of one’s savings. It sounds attractive on the surface but loses all lustre when probed a bit deeper.

For a start, “free” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. In reality, the care provided would obviously not be free. The money to fund this endeavour would still be coming out of your savings and your children’s future inheritance.

To understand this sentiment further, let us remember the origin of this idea. Back in 2010, the then-Secretary of State........

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