New Catholic-born British prime minister Andy Burnham calls for reforms to systems that harm the most vulnerable.
Andy Burnham took office as prime minister of the United Kingdom on July 20, 2026, becoming Britain’s first Catholic-born head of government in nearly 500 years. Just over a week into the job, already he called for major reforms to a system that harms the most vulnerable.
A big issue facing the U.K. is its tottering social care system. Social care — services for people who need extra help with daily living, often due to disabilities, mental health conditions, or old age — is poorly funded and organized. British commentators call it a “broken system” that has become “inhumane and inefficient.”
Unlike the nation’s National Health Service (NHS), social care is not free at the point of use. Instead, individuals must exhaust their personal savings to access social care for themselves and their family members, wreaking crippling financial strain on many families.
“I think social care in England is as unfair as American healthcare,” Burnham said. “The vulnerable pay with everything.”
One of Burnham’s first priorities is fixing this system, just weeks before Parliament is set to vote September 11 on a bill that would legalize assisted suicide for terminally ill adults. Burnham’s call to fix the social-care system echoes the concerns of Catholic bishops and right-to-life advocates across the country.
Nine days after taking office, Burnham made a visit to Jewish Care, a leading health and social care charity for the Jewish community, to deliver a major policy speech outlining sweeping reforms to England’s adult social care system.
He chose that location carefully: “I want to start with what’s good about the system,” he said, and Jewish Care “is the gold standard; this is how it should be.”
Noting that his own father, who has dementia, has received social care for some time, Burnham has seen firsthand the good and bad of the system. And while praising the excellent care his father has received, he proposed that it’s well past time to overhaul the system.
Burnham said he was tackling the crisis “for my dad and the millions like him up and down the country,” calling the historic failure to fix social care a “major dereliction of public duty” by politicians.
Burnham’s 3 proposals for reform
Burnham laid out plans for a national care service that would be “highly integrated” with the NHS, built around three commitments:
- Fast-tracking Baroness Louise Casey's Independent Commission on Adult Social Care, expediting its final report by a year to summer 2027
- Improving pay, training, and working conditions for the social care workforce
- Opening cross-party talks in Parliament in an attempt to break decades of political inaction and reform gridlock
“Who knows how long I will be in this position, but as long as I am, I will do my best to find a solution,” Burnham said.
Burnham’s Catholic influence
While Burnham has said his faith is more cultural than devotional, Catholic Social Teaching remains a bedrock influence on his work. In 2023, he told The Telegraph, “I was brought up in the belief in Catholic social teaching and that was hugely formative. As I saw it, the closest thing to what I was told there was Labour politics.”
His proposed reforms come at an intense time for the British isles, as Parliament is set to hold a Second Reading vote on September 11 on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which would legalize assisted suicide for terminally ill adults in England and Wales. (A previous iteration of the bill ran out of time in an earlier session.)
Catholics, disability-rights groups, and others across the UK are voicing public opposition to the bill.
In a pastoral letter to the faithful of the Diocese of Nottingham, Bishop Patrick McKinney urgently called for Catholics to write to their MPs to share their concerns ahead of the vote on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. His letter was read at all Sunday Masses in the diocese over the weekend of August 8-9.
Archbishop John Sherrington, Archbishop of Liverpool and Lead Bishop for Life Issues for the Bishops’ Conference, said in a statement:
It is highly significant that the Prime Minister has confirmed his position about the need for proper palliative and social care ahead of the Second Reading of the fundamentally flawed Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in September.
People who are dying are vulnerable and need compassionate care and spiritual accompaniment until their last breath.
We have consistently called for meaningful investment in palliative and end of life care as an appropriate focus to uphold the dignity of all at the end of life and opposed a bill seeking to legalise assisted suicide. This level of care can be found in many Catholic care homes and hospices, but the sector remains woefully underfunded and there is an existential threat to these places of compassion and care should this legislation be passed.
I once more urge parliamentarians to vote against this dangerous legislation on 11 September and to work together to ensure that our palliative and social care services can be held up as examples of truly dignified care at the end of life for all.
The prime minister’s steps to reform social care directly address this major concern of the bishops and all those opposed to the assisted-dying bill.
In fact, in a press conference after his Jewish Care speech, reporters asked Burnham about assisted dying directly. His answer echoed the bishops almost word for word, as he said, “I think there's something that needs to happen first. That is the fixing of the funding of palliative care and social care.”
Social care reform is one of several ways Burnham is promising to help the most vulnerable. On his first day in office, Andy Burnham promised to end rough sleeping—what Americans call homelessness—and pledged an additional £340 million to the cause.
Archbishop of Westminster Richard Moth told the BBC that being a Catholic, as Burnham is, “informs conscience, the way you think about things,” and that he hoped under Burnham, “we are going to see that real concern for humanity, not just on the grand scale but for the needs of families and the homeless.”
With his pledges to reform social care and end rough sleeping, perhaps the U.K. is beginning to see that “real concern for humanity” in action.
