Yvette Cooper, who has been an MP since 1997, is by far the most experienced health secretary we’ve had in the past decade. She has had a range of heavyweight ministerial and shadow ministerial roles, including a stint as parliamentary under-secretary of state for health. Health secretary is also a brief in which Andy Burnham served at the end of the Brown government. 

With this embarrassment of experience comes baggage. When Burnham was health secretary, he released a green paper proposing a ‘National Care Service’ (NCS) which could have made social care ‘free’ for all elderly and disabled people. An Act of Parliament was passed to facilitate this in April 2010 but the plans were abandoned by the Coalition. Labour has continued to argue for an NCS ever since, and last year Louise Casey was given the chair of a cross-party independent commission on social care reform, due to publish its second stage outlining ‘long term reforms’ in 2028.

Much like the creation of the National Health Service, the creation of a National Care Service will be extremely expensive. The SNP government in Holyrood had to shelve its own plans to introduce an NCS partly because of concerns about costs. Nobody can accurately forecast how much it would cost in England and Wales........

© The Spectator