LONDON — British Prime Minister Andy Burnham today relaunched his years-long bid to create a national service to tackle a UK crisis in the care of elderly and vulnerable adults.

Burnham, whose father has Alzheimer’s disease and lives in a care home, previously proposed a national care service when he was health minister from 2009 to 2010 under former prime minister Gordon Brown.

Speaking at a care home in north London less than two weeks after becoming prime minister, he said he was determined to tackle the issue of social care again “for my dad and the millions like him”.

A bill to legalise assisted dying failed in parliament in April after getting bogged down in Britain’s unelected upper house.

Care costs for the elderly and vulnerable often fall on their families, who can struggle to find the funds or are left shouldering the burden of caring for their loved ones.

“I think social care in England is as unfair as American healthcare,” Burnham said, adding that families often have to pay for “everything and it can completely leave them with nothing”.

Burnham was due to hold a cross-party meeting with the main opposition Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats later Wednesday seeking to find a consensus on the issue.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has already written to the prime minister asking him to rule out tax rises or increased borrowing to pay for his reforms.

The invitation to join the talks was not extended to Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigration Reform UK Party who accused Burnham of “conspiring behind closed doors” to “foist further tax rises on the country”.

Total expenditure on adult social care in England in 2024/5 reached £34.5 billion (RM188 billion), up from £28.4 billion in 20210/11, figures from the King’s Fund think tank showed.

According to Burnham, successive governments had failed to tackle reform of social care, seeing it as “too difficult” and politically risky.

It had been a “major dereliction of duty that parliament has not faced up to this,” he said.