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- [00:00]
Adam Fleming
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
Carl's Jr. Advertiser
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- [00:36]
Ashley Akonetti
This is Ashley Akonetti from the Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous podcast. Did you know that over 70% of new parents are combo feeding? They're using both breast milk and formula to feed their baby. Whether you're exclusively formula feeding, combo feeding or just want to back up in the pantry, Bobby is the formula that I trust to deliver safe, complete nutrition to my baby's bottle. Both of my children use Bobby. We loved it so much. Had the best experience with this brand. They're incredible. The customer service, what they stand for. Bobby's organic European style formulas are crafted with clinically backed ingredients and designed for easy digestion just like breast milk. I did a lot of research before formula feeding and I loved what I saw from Bobby. Every single batch goes through 2000 plus safety and quality checks before leaving their owned US manufacturing facility. If you want to feed with confidence too, head to hi bobby.com that is high h I b o b b I e dot com to find your baby's new favorite formula.
- [01:53]
Adam Fleming
Hello. So just a quick explanation of what's happening in your newscast podcast feed. In the early hours of Monday morning, the full interview of Andy Burnham by Laura Kay in number 10 north, which was recorded on Friday and which we previewed on Sunday, landed in your feeds. So it's there for you to listen to if you haven't done so already. And later on in this episode, I'll be catching up with Henry Zeffman to chew over some of the bits of the interview that we weren't able to talk to Laura about on Sunday, particularly focusing on the Prime Minister's comments on social care. But first of all, we're gonna kick off this episode with the huge fires in Spain and France, which has seen tens and tens of thousands of people forced to evacuate from their homes and has flooded our TV screens with really apocalyptic looking pictures. So that's a little flavor of what you'll get on this episode of Newscast
- [02:45]
Ashley Akonetti
Newscast Newscast from The BBC.
- [02:47]
Carl's Jr. Advertiser
Humanity's next great V. You know, I like my bosses.
- [02:51]
Hator Morales
I'll come on to them. I see that he was, I guess,
- [02:53]
Carl's Jr. Advertiser
the mayor of a town.
- [02:54]
Adam Fleming
Ooh la.
- [02:55]
Thinking about it like a panto helped.
- [02:57]
Hator Morales
Do we play music now or what do we do?
- [02:59]
Adam Fleming
And what will you do? Stare at a wall?
- [03:03]
Hello, it's Adam in the newscast studio. And shortly I'll be catching up with Henry Zeffman to talk about social care in England. But first of all, we've had our eye on these huge, and I mean absolutely massive wildfires in Spain and. And France. In France, the fires are getting very close to the city of Bordeaux and people in the city are saying that they can see quite a lot of smoke now, so it feels very close for them. Then in Madrid, there's been huge numbers of evacuations of people there too. Pedro Sanchez, the Spanish Prime Minister, he's gone to see some of the affected areas on another bit of Spain. And Emmanuel Macron, the French President, he's gone to see what is happening near Bordeaux. And there's some very, very dramatic video of. Of a thunderstorm in France that was created by the fire, a quite unusual phenomenon in Europe. And also here in the uk, a fire has been raging in the Cairngorms in the far north of Scotland for nearly two weeks now. But the good news for people living there in a little village called Nethy Bridge, is that they have been allowed to return back to their homes. So lots of stuff to talk about in relation to wildfires and how our changing climate interacts with the risk of wildfires here and abroad. So to help us understand what's going on, I'm joined here in the studio by Theodore Keeping, who's a climate and wildfire scientist who's based at Imperial College in London. Hello, Theodore.
- [04:27]
Theodore Keeping
Hello.
- [04:27]
Adam Fleming
We met on Newsnight the other night.
- [04:29]
Theodore Keeping
We did.
- [04:29]
Adam Fleming
So welcome back to a different bit of the BBC. Yeah, we've got a lot more time on a podcast as opposed. Very good live news.
- [04:36]
Theodore Keeping
Some real scientific detail.
- [04:38]
Adam Fleming
Yeah, do some geeky stuff. And also joining us on the line is senior reporter from Politico Morales. Hello, Hator.
- [04:46]
Hi, Adam.
- [04:46]
Hator Morales
Hi, Theodore.
- [04:47]
Adam Fleming
Thanks for joining us. So which fires have you got your eye on particular? Or are you doing the whole. Basically the whole of Southern Europe.
- [04:54]
Hator Morales
A lot of. A lot of looking at Southern Europe, but my main focus in Spain in this case, since what. What we're looking at is what's being described over there as the most aggressive wildfires in Spanish history. So just to give you guys an idea. If you, if you locate Madrid in the dead center of the Iberian Peninsula, this is starting to encircle the southwest of Madrid and it's starting to get into a lot of the towns that are essentially commuter towns for the city.
- [05:19]
Adam Fleming
And also the thing that's got me about these fires isn't necessarily like the dramatic pictures because we're sort of getting used to that. It's actually the number of people being evacuated from their homes. I was doing a program on the radio the other day and the news bulletin beforehand was saying in France, 200,000 people having to leave their homes. And that for me, that seems like a new thing to me.
- [05:41]
Hator Morales
Yes, absolutely. So in Madrid, what we saw were over 100,000 people displaced, and the majority of them continue to be in shelters around the community of Madrid. And then you have an additional 20 to 40,000 people who have been placed on mandatory lockdown in their towns because it's so dangerous to venture outside Theodora.
- [06:02]
Adam Fleming
Can you give us a sense of perspective of how bad these fires are compared to what normally happens in summer when it's very hot in these parts of Europe?
- [06:10]
Theodore Keeping
Yeah. So these both sets, threats of these fires have been really extreme. They've spread very fast and they're also burning very hot, which means they're very hard to control or put out. And also they've burnt continuously, kind of aggressively, for multiple days in a row. Normally the weather kind of dips down for a few days and you get a chance to put a fire out. The reality is that these fires are spreading in a way that we very rarely see in Europe. They're spreading very fast. And it's not just the kind of destruction of the towns or the, or the disruption of people's lives. These, these fires have kind of huge knock on impacts. They have economic impacts and they have health impacts in terms of the exposure to smoke as well.
- [06:49]
Adam Fleming
And do we have the firefighting skills and equipment and resources to deal with fires that are bigger than normal?
- [06:56]
Theodore Keeping
Yeah, we can't put out a fire this big. It's not something you can feasibly do. They're just too intense. I mean, we've seen in France. We might talk about this a bit later. The fire has created its own weather system. The updraft is so big, it' created a kind of cumulus cloud above the fire.
- [07:12]
Adam Fleming
Yeah, just explain how that works.
- [07:13]
Theodore Keeping
Yes. Okay. So sorry, we're hopping all around, but this is kind of my specialist subject, so that might happen a bit.
- [07:19]
Adam Fleming
Love hopping around. It's fine.
- [07:20]
Theodore Keeping
So when A fire gets really, really large. It creates a, a huge updraft drawing in lots and lots of air, which fuels the fire further. And as that updraft forms, it creates a huge column of rising air. And that is the process that ultimately results in a cumulonimbus cloud, a thunderstorm, as, as we' that kind of rapid rising and falling of air that creates the kind of the condensation particles that form a cloud and also lightning. And, and this rain will fall, but because it's so hot, it normally won't reach the fire. It will evaporate mid air. And so you think about rain not even being able to put out a fire and the scale of that compared to what you're able to pump out of a plane or a lorry. You can't actually control or extinguish fires like this. All you can do to answer your original question is you can get ahead of them, you can bulldoze, veget and you can evacuate people. And that's what we, I mean, they've done a really, I'm really impressed at how proactive they've been in doing that. It's so hard to, to organize that level of evacuation.
- [08:26]
Adam Fleming
And just on the, the, the, the clouds and the storms, how common is that in Europe?
- [08:31]
Theodore Keeping
I mean, that is something that was historically very, very rare. We started to see this a couple of times in Spain and Portugal in the 2010s, and you need a really massive fire, really intense mean, it's a whole weather system you're powering. And you know, there's this interesting thing going on in fire in lots of parts of the world, including Europe, where we're seeing, you know, more aggressive suppression of smaller fires. We're better preventing ignitions and those sorts of things. But because climate change is making these really extreme weather conditions so severe, we're seeing a different trend in the extremes. And so we're seeing these massive fires as well.
- [09:12]
Adam Fleming
Ito, is this natural disaster story, particularly in Spain, turning into a political disaster for the government?
- [09:19]
Hator Morales
Less so for the government and actually more so for the opposition, curiously enough. So Spain has a very interesting constitution whereby everything is decentralized and that's a counter reaction to the years of dictatorship. And so both in terms of land management and crisis management, those are both regional competences. So in this case, what we have is a pretty extraordinary circumstance whereby the Community of Madrid actually asked the national government to take over power and essentially come into its own jurisdiction to handle the fires because it admitted it was not able to address it. Of Course, there is going to be a blame game after this in terms of how exactly the woodlands got to such a state. And the reality is that this is very, very expensive. We've been hearing it for years. I had the misfortune of previously being a foreign correspondent in Portugal during the years that Theodore was describing in 2017, when they had their massive, deadly fires. And what you hear is the same thing over and over again. You have the phenomenon of people moving to cities during the latter half of the 20th century. There's just a lot less activity in the rural areas. And the sort of farming, sheep herding, that used to deal with a lot of that land management. It just doesn't happen anymore.
- [10:33]
Adam Fleming
Yeah, ISORE is making a very good point there, which is a lot of fire prevention isn't stopping people having barbecues or cutting down on arson. It's actually managing woodlands and forests well, rather than just letting them grow out of control.
- [10:45]
Theodore Keeping
Yeah, 100%. It's.
- [10:47]
Adam Fleming
Which doesn't sound as exciting as spending money on those. Those planes that come and scoop water out of lakes. Yeah, maybe more effective.
- [10:55]
Theodore Keeping
Yeah, well, quite. The planes do have their place. I mean, they. They're really good at controlling, you know, the edge of the fire and just slowing it so that firefighters can respond. But the vegetation management is key for risk management. You think about any kind of really devastating urban fire where a wildfire comes into an urban area. What happens in most of those scenarios is it's spreading so fast that the firefighters can't get ahead of it, and then it spreads into. Into the town through vegetation running into the town. So that happened in South Korea early last year. It happened in L. A. It happened. It's happened in Greece in the Matti fires in, I think it was 2009. So these are when we see, like, the worst impact of fires, where tens of people die and lots and lots of property is destroyed. And that's. That's a whole other thing. So. So in. In fire science, we. We talk about something called the WUI which is the. The wildland urban interface. And you think about the fires that we see in. In California, say these massive, huge fires, or Canada. In Europe, we have a very different landscape. We've got a much more fragmented landscape. And so we've got settlements intermingling with veget, with agriculture. And, you know, there is.
- [12:11]
Adam Fleming
There were more worries.
- [12:13]
Theodore Keeping
There are more worries. And that woo is changing very fast because we're developing a lot. And also there's a lot of rural abandonment at the same time. So it's very complex in terms of managing the risk.
- [12:23]
Adam Fleming
We'll talk about what that might mean for the UK in future in a second. But itor just, just going back to the fires in, in France and Spain, another kind of thing that's psychologically interesting for me as a journalist and a former geographer, is a lot of the headlines are, oh, the fire is just a few kilometers away from Madrid, the fire is just a few kilometers away from Bordeaux. So actually, when the focus becomes a big city, the story becomes even more kind of apocalyptic. So it's kind of like an, like an economic story maybe.
- [12:51]
Hator Morales
Very much so. Very much so. And the fact that it is, you know, in the French case, obviously Bordeaux is a major city. In the Spanish case, it really is something where I think it is driving the point much closer to home than other catastrophic fires that we've had in the sense that people being directly affected are people who work in the city, who work in the ministries, and who are now unable to go to their homes or are actually seeing their homes go up in flames. And I do think that this is going to put a lot of pressure on regional governments. The majority of these are in the hands of the. Of the conservative opposition in Spain. So it's going to raise a lot of questions for them. But ultimately, we go back to what we were saying before, which is that kind of, regardless of the political color, what we see is a lack of investment, which is a pattern you see across Europe simply because it is such a massive amount of money that needs to be spent on handling these. These areas that previously were just routinely handled by, again, sheep herders or people who lived in rural communities that are emptying out. And there may be some backlash for these governments because admittedly, a lot of the money that they could have spent on that they've spent with, you know, in the case of the community of Madrid, they invested heavily, for example, in promoting bullfighting. So that the regional president is getting a lot of backlash for investing in that instead of investing in the fire service, where there are a bunch of vacant positions precisely in the team in charge of dealing with forest fires.
- [14:13]
Adam Fleming
Oh, wow. So they had more bullfighters than firefighters. Probably not precisely numbers that, but politically, yes, yes.
- [14:21]
Hator Morales
It's a bit of an awkward position to be in. And the reality is the firefighters have been raising these, these concerns across Spain for years. They are woefully underpaid for the amount of risk risks that they take. But unfortunately, the spotlight is only on them when the fires are going in. The rest of the year. There's, there's just a lot less intention and a lot less pressure for governments to invest in them properly.
- [14:43]
Adam Fleming
And Theodore, what's your take on that kind of perception point? Because I'm also thinking here in the uk, there's quite a big fire in the Cairngorms in northern Scotland that's been burning for 13 days and some people had to leave a village. They've been allowed back now. But it's not a huge news story and you don't get people much further south sort of starting to panic about that. So there's a real, there's a real perception thing.
- [15:05]
Hator Morales
There is.
- [15:06]
Theodore Keeping
You remember in the 2022 London wildfires when I think, you know, tens of houses burned down and there was a, an incident declared and there were no fire engines available in all of London. You know, these are the, these are the moments, sadly, where it, it breaks through. But obviously by the time it's breaking through, you're already seeing massive impacts. And you know, this is classic for any kind of climate related impact. Scale of the damages don't materialize until they materialize in a really big way. Because that's the nature of extreme events. You know, they're rare and that, but they're becoming much more likely. And then when they do happen, the impacts, you know, create a lot of short term motivation. You think about in la still there's an inquiry going on into the fires and lots of people are kind of thinking about what could have been done differently. But you know, that inquiry rightly is focused on those fires. But there are lots of different fires that could have happened and it's not, you know, weather is random fire, an individual fire is a random event. But we know that the behavior of fires overall is becoming more extreme at that kind of high risk tail.
- [16:14]
Adam Fleming
Yeah. And what is a way of thinking about the climate change element to this? Because I just keep thinking back to when we were on Newsnight a couple of weeks ago and I asked a similar question and I continued and then said, oh, but the mayor of the region in Spain that we were talking about that day said, oh, this wasn't climate change. It was caused by an electricity pylon collapsing or sparking. And then you said, well, no, climate change doesn't cause fires. Yeah, there always has to be a spark. It doesn't matter where the spark comes from. Climate change provides sort of the context for what the spark does.
- [16:45]
Theodore Keeping
Yeah. And it doesn't make all fires worse because you can still have a fire on a relatively cool, humid day where it doesn't really spread very far. What happens is that the extremes, the really hot days, the really dry days that are really windy, those days, say a 1 in 10 year event that's becoming much, much more intense. So when we do see that extreme event, the weather, the driving weather conditions are worse. And that's, I think that's really the key way to think about any kind of climate change impact is you're not thinking about the specific weather that you're experiencing. You're thinking about what does an event that rare mean today versus before climate change. And you can say the same about fires.
- [17:29]
Adam Fleming
Yeah. And on that linkage between climate change and fires that are actually occurring, you're doing some work in real time about that for these fires now, aren't you?
- [17:38]
Theodore Keeping
Yeah, so I work at a group called World Weather Attribution and what we do is we look at extreme weather events as they're happening or just after they happen. And we looked at the changing likelihood of that event. So how likely is it today? How likely was it before human caused climate change? How likely will it be in the future? And also maybe thinking about the intensity of events if of similar likelihood. And yeah, so right, right now we're doing a study on this that'll be out on Thursday.
- [18:04]
Adam Fleming
And you know what, help us understand that study when it comes out on Thursday. Did you just come up with a number or judgment, like what's the sort of the bottom line?
- [18:11]
Theodore Keeping
So what you do is you look at the distribution of all extreme events. So every year, for example, what is the worst few days of fire weather in this region? And you look at that every year and you find the statistical relationship between the chance of that event and the global average temperature. And you can, that basically enables you to say what was the return period of the event that we saw in 1950? Oh, it was a one in 20 year event, but if it was today, it would be a one in three year event. And so you are basically able to look at the changing likelihood over time and we then kind of fold in, not just observational analysis, but all of the climate models we can get our hands on and all this stuff and do some kind of hardcore data analysis and find that number.
- [18:54]
Adam Fleming
Yeah, and I saw in the political conversation in Spain, from listening to you so far, it sounds like a classic politics conversation about who's got the power, who's to blame for underfunding the fire service or having the wrong priorities for public spending. Is Spanish politics having a climate change conversation about these fires or Is it just a classic politics around a disaster?
- [19:16]
Hator Morales
It is and it isn't. It is true that in this case it does rise to a special level simply because the Conservative opposition party, the People's Party, in order to enter into regional government, what it's done is entered into governing coalitions with the far right Volks party. And one of the pillar positions that it has to adopt in these governments is a climate denialist position, a position saying that man made climate change doesn't exist and a direct rejection of the European Green deal. So a lot of those climate mitigation targets that the Commission tries to promote from Brussels, is it an issue? It's an issue at this moment, unfortunately, when it comes to climate in Spain, people's memory is, is very, very, very short. And we saw that a couple of years ago with the Valencia floods. People were very upset at the moment, but afterward you really haven't seen the long term effects. Now, the only thing I would caution is Spain has to hold elections within the next year, specifically before August of 2027. And if those elections are scheduled during the summer and there are fires going on, as happens almost every summer in Spain, then maybe climate will actually be part of the conversation.
- [20:28]
Adam Fleming
And Theodore, give us some pointers for the conversation that we'll probably be having in the UK in the next few years about this. As we get warmer and we're at greater risk of forests.
- [20:36]
Theodore Keeping
Yeah, I mean, one of the big things in the UK is the emergence of the summer fire season. So if you think about when you normally see a news story about a fire, it's actually normally in the late winter, early spring. And that's because the fires tended to have historically occurred when vegetation is dormant before it starts growing and it's drier. And that's kind of the moorland fire fires and even the fires that you'd see in the Cairngorms, you'd normally expect them to be at that time of year. But what, what is increasingly happening is we're reaching hot extremes that we just historically have not experienced. And that has a huge effect on the kind of vulnerability of vegetation to fire. You think about how brown the British landscape is right now. It's, it's. I mean, I, I was on a holiday earlier and I was flying into Luton and just looking over the fields, it was kind of tinder dry everywhere. And that is a huge risk. And what that means is fires are more likely to break out and when they break out, they're more likely to spread more rapidly.
- [21:40]
Adam Fleming
And we talked about The WUI earlier on, do we need to do something about the rural urban interface in the uk?
- [21:48]
Theodore Keeping
Yeah, it's definitely something we need to think about. There's a lot of people, this is the thing as well. Often in these conversations there's a lot of people thinking about this at the kind of expert level or even at the policy level, but it's not necessarily translating into action until something bad happens. And the, the WUI or what we might call the rui which is the rural interface in, in the UK is, is massive. I mean almost all, all houses are exposed or close to exposed to the rui and that means a lot of things, particularly in terms of vegetation management. So you know, the, you don't want
- [22:24]
Adam Fleming
to live next to a forest.
- [22:25]
Theodore Keeping
You don't.
- [22:26]
Adam Fleming
Well, I mean, nice, you probably do want. Yeah, nice most days of the year, apart from it's on fire.
- [22:31]
Theodore Keeping
Yeah, yeah, quite. And so we have seen those sorts happen in the UK and it is a risk, I don't imagine that there will be any kind of, you know, legislation on the management of that risk until we see some, some more kind of devastating events, to be honest.
- [22:50]
Adam Fleming
Yeah. And there's more of a political incentive to deal with it. Itor, I'll give you the last word. Do you, do you think that this set of fires in Spain is going to change Spanish politics or is it just another episode of a bad thing happening and psychologically people of like memory hole it and move on?
- [23:09]
Hator Morales
Unfortunately, I don't think there will be major change. It's, it's interesting because if you look at the big surveys of European, Spaniards tend to rank among the Europeans that most believe in man made climate change and most want solutions to be proposed. But ultimately this doesn't end up being a major driver in the elections that I've covered over the last few years, despite the fact that they generally take place during droughts, during situations where climate is very much part of the economic conversation. And just to the point that Theodore was making, I do think that this ties into so many other problems that we see in Spain and in other parts of Europe where we're talking about a housing crisis. One of the government's big policies is to try to promote non massive urban centers. But when, you know, returning to the countryside means you're going to be facing these kind of threats, it's just, it's not of interest to people. So then they can't keep going to the urban centers that already are impossible to afford. So it just, it adds on to a problem that continues to perpetuate itself.
- [24:07]
Adam Fleming
So interesting. Itor. Thank you very much.
- [24:10]
Hator Morales
Pleasure.
- [24:11]
Adam Fleming
And Theodore, thanks for coming into the newscast studio rather than the Newsnight studio.
- [24:14]
Theodore Keeping
Thank you very much.
- [24:24]
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- [24:54]
Ashley Akonetti
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- [26:09]
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- [26:42]
Adam Fleming
I've briefly relocated to a different newscast studio. And now we're going to talk about politics because the rest of Laura's interview with Andy Burnham. The whole thing is now out in the wild on TV, radio and iPlayer and BBC Sounds. And the thing that been getting lots of headlines is his comments about social care and specifically he says Andy Burnham, that if we don't fix social care in England, then that risks catastrophe for the NHS in England. That's got a lot of people talking. Partly, I'm just wondering, is this politics as usual where a new Prime Minister comes into Downing street and one of the first things he says is, we've got to sort out social care, or is there actually something different this time with Andy Burnham? And the person who can help us brainstorm that is BBC chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman, who's at Westminster. Hello, Henry.
- [27:30]
Hi, Adam.
- [27:31]
So it's not politics as usual, is it? Don't know why I said that.
- [27:34]
Well, I think there is a big question about whether Andy Burnham's approach to social care, which is what we're going to talk about, is politics as usual. Because the politics as usual approach to social care is to be a Prime Minister who says that you are going to fix this riddle once and for all and then for us to look back and discover that you didn't. After all, that is what has happened to a succession of Prime Ministers over the past two decades or so. And Andy Burnham is adamant that he is going to be the Prime Minister who doesn't just try to grasp this nettle, but successfully does grasp it and end up at least moving the system in England into a better shape.
- [28:13]
And so the headlines that have been generated by this bit of Laura's interview are where he talks about basically the threat, as he sees it, to the NHS if sort out social care, and he says it could be a catastrophe for the NHS that could collapse.
- [28:25]
Henry Zeffman
This cost the NHS billions of pounds and we will never get the NHS back to good waiting time standards until we fix social care.
- [28:34]
Adam Fleming
And that's the point though, isn't it?
- [28:36]
This is something actually, in interviews, you and I have discussed this for 20 years.
- [28:39]
There have been proposals on the table, very similar proposals being put on the table time after time after time after time. This is about political will, is it not?
- [28:48]
Henry Zeffman
And I won't change coming into this job. I'm not going to take different positions than the ones I've long put to you in interviews. Whatever political capital I have, I will put in to fixing broken social care and I would not want to leave office without having brought in the substantial change, the new system of social care that you described. I can't put a timeline on it right here, right now. If we don't do it, the NHS will collapse under the weight of trying to care for people who've really not really needed to end up in the NHS system.
- [29:25]
Adam Fleming
I mean, what's really interesting there is that actually that is a big issue that lots of politicians and experts have talked about with social care, about how other parts of the state are creaking because of. Of the kind of downstream consequences of our social care system. But actually, when people talk about. When politicians talk about the crisis in social care, what I think they more often mean is the question of funding and the amount that individuals sometimes have to pay at unpredictable moments and for obviously unknowable periods of time to fund their own care. That is usually what people mean by the crisis of social care. That is what Andy Burnham had a go at dealing with when he was health secretary 17, 16 years ago under Gordon Brown. And so he's giving a speech on social care, we expect later this week. And I think what a lot of politicians within the Labour Party and beyond are looking for is actually the at least start of a solution or an indication of his direction of travel on funding, as well as the other crises of social care, one of which he talks about in that interview with Laura
- [30:44]
and previous Prime Ministers. Their answer to the sometimes, like catastrophic costs that people encounter for their care or their loved ones care has been to have a cap on the total costs and then you change the means test for how much free care you get get from the state as part of that. But actually, it sounds like Andy Burnham's approach is that the care is done like the nhs, it's just free for everyone. Forget the means test, forget the cap, you just don't have to pay it at all because it's funded by taxpayers.
- [31:14]
Well, that is what he has talked about in the past, especially when he was Health Secretary, and he called for a national care service. And he's talked much more recently than that about wanting a social care system that operates on the NHS principle. So, again, I think he's talking about care being. Being free at the point of use. But the general notion is that if that is the direction Andy Burnham goes in, it wouldn't be funded out of general taxation in quite the same way. You might have what's called a hypothecated tax. So a particular tax would go specifically towards funding the care system. At some points in the past, Andy Burnham has suggested a 10% levy on estates, so essentially an inheritance tax to fund the care service. That is what David Cameron, as the then Conservative leader and soon to be Prime Minister, described as a death tax at the 2010 general election. So perhaps Andy Burnham has been burnt by that particular suggestion of how to fund A national care service. But look, I mean, let's just look in the round at the various ideas which Andy Burnham has mooted over the past few weeks. And this is at the start of his second week as Prime Minister. There are all sorts of ideas, policies, issues, where he has suggested that the state might want to spend more money, defense spending, on helping ease the cost of living, and so on and so on. And so you start to look at them together and wonder whether, okay, that might well potentially mean quite a significant increase in taxes being levied by the state. But then Andy Burnham also talks about wanting cross party consensus on this, this. And we've heard from the Conservatives this morning and they say we're very up for being part of cross party talks on this, but our red line is that new money for social care needs to be funded by cuts rather than by taxes or by borrowing.
- [33:10]
And then, as you said, that we're gonna get a speech from him on social care, we think, later this week. So, fleshing out some of the remarks he made to Laura.
- [33:17]
That's right. And I think he will make a big show out of wanting that cross party consensus, because he knows, as politicians of all parties do, that if you have cross party consensus at the moment of a big reform, then that reform is much more likely to be durable, to survive the inevitability that at some point, whether it's in the distant future or the near future, a political party that is different to your own comes into government. So if they're bought into it at this point, then they will keep it. However, I do think there are different kinds of cross party consensus here, because a cross party consensus that social care is broken and needs fixed, that already exists. That is not a hard cross party consensus to forge, but a cross party consensus on what a new social care model in England should look like. I think that's a bit harder, though. Again, I think I can see how a cross party consensus could be forged. But then a cross party consensus on how to fund that new system. Well, that is essentially saying you want a cross party consensus on tax policy policy, on economic policy. Well, we have political parties because people have very different opinions on how much of their money should be taxed, on what kinds of things the state should and should not do, on to what extent there ought to be a reward for success in work, and to what extent the safety net should or should not be there. These are the, the stuff of politics and the stuff of political parties. So whether you can get a cross party consensus there, I think that is a very tall order.
- [34:55]
And also in a lot of this debate, it's just worth remembering what politicians are talking about funding here. Whatever the funding model, it's usually the actual cost of the care, not the additional things like what it costs to be in a care home.
- [35:08]
That's what we think is being talked about here, the cost of providing the care, rather than, than, as you say, the costs of accommodation and associated costs. But again, I think it's a blank canvas. Not in the sense that no one has talked about this before. I mean, this is an extremely, this has been an extremely well discussed issue over decades, including by Andy Burnham himself. But it's a bit of a blank canvas what Andy Burnham wants to try to solve in the first instance. And of course he is also inheriting a government review, which is meant to be coming up with at least some sort of a solution to some of these questions, because Keir Starmer commissioned Louise Casey, former senior civil servant as well as all purpose government troubleshooter, to look at this after he came into office. But to the frustration of quite a lot of people around Keir Starmer at the top of his government, he said that she wouldn't report until 2028. I think one of the things we might hear from Andy Burnham this week is that he wants Louise Casey to report back sooner than that, perhaps next year, 2027, and that would then give him a period of time, although not a massive period of time before the likely next general election, for him to begin enacting either her reforms or some version of her reforms that he himself would like to pursue.
- [36:33]
Now, talking of taxes and changing where they're levied and the rate that they're levied at. I hear we've had another example of something being raised in the, in Burnham world as a, as an option, but this time it's been very, very quickly squashed in the real world.
- [36:50]
Yeah, I mean, there was one story in a newspaper suggesting that Andy Burnham might be looking at abolishing council tax and stamp duty and replacing them with a new sort of land value tax that would be paid continuously or annually or whatever it may be. Now, that got a lot of attention because obviously it would be a radical tax shift and would conform with some things which Andy Burnham has talked about wanting to explore in the past. But obviously if that were to be left in the ether as a possibility, it would have risked gumming up the housing market because people might think, well, I'm not going to move now if there's a possibility that this new Prime Minister and new Chancellor John Healey are going to announce the abolition of stamp duty in just a few months time. Anyway, for anyone who read that story and got excited or indeed thought it was the wrong thing to do, the government's Prime Minister's spokesperson has said this morning it is not something that Andy Burnham is looking at.
- [37:57]
Right. That's serious stuff, Henry. Let's have some fun now.
- [38:00]
Oh, okay.
- [38:01]
This is now becoming a regular gimmick.
- [38:04]
Oh, not again.
- [38:07]
We did so well last time.
- [38:09]
Oh, well, the only way is down.
- [38:11]
True, actually. Or even just consistency. So last time, Henry Zeffman, your specialist subject was Rafa Benitez. You said that your other potential specialist subject, if you were ever to go on Celebrity Mastermind, would be the comedy show Peep Show.
- [38:26]
Well, now I know why I've. Now I know why producer Jack asked me to come on today. Clearly, this.
- [38:32]
No. For your political knowledge. No, for your political knowledge.
- [38:35]
Yeah, I have. Okay. Oh, anyway, I'll get the excuses in after I get these questions wrong.
- [38:39]
There's only one question because it is just for fun.
- [38:41]
Yeah.
- [38:43]
Which Mexican restaurant does Mark get a job at in series six of Peep Show?
- [38:52]
Is it called, like, Los Banditos or something like that?
- [38:56]
It is. Yay.
- [38:58]
Hator Morales
Come on.
- [38:59]
Adam Fleming
I mean, come on. This is in your interest for this to be a regular feature because it makes you look very glued up. I mean, but you look glued up anyway because of the conversation we just had about politics. Well done. I feel we should have.
- [39:08]
I dredged that up from the back of my memory. I was worried there.
- [39:11]
I feel I'm just looking over at my colleagues who do not work full time on Quiz Show. I was thinking we needed a second question there, so there was a sense of jeopardy.
- [39:18]
Save it.
- [39:18]
Because I'm just like, oh, save it
- [39:20]
for the next time you ask me on under false pretext and then ambush me with a quiz.
- [39:24]
Yeah. Just as well you only said two specialist subjects. If you've given more, we'd then be doing this on a weekly basis. But well done.
- [39:30]
Thank you, Adam.
- [39:31]
Also, you know our feature we're doing called you'd 100 days, where we're getting people to email in with what sort of achievements they want to make during andy Burnham's first 100 days. Have you heard about this?
- [39:41]
I have, yes. Yeah.
- [39:42]
Don't worry, I'm not gonna make you come up with one.
- [39:44]
No, no, that's all right.
- [39:46]
And impartial reporting.
- [39:47]
Always. Always.
- [39:49]
So I'm just looking at the inbox to give you some of the good ones. Ben in Manchester says for the first hundred days of Andy Burnham being Prime Ministerial, I'm gonna get through couch to 5K, which coincidentally started on Monday when he became PM. Our house went on the market 10 days ago, so we'll see if we can complete a house move before the end of his first hundred days. But that's probably a lot less likely then completing couch to 5K. Good luck, Ben.
- [40:14]
The thing is, mine is the exact inverse of Ben's because I was, I had got quite in. I wasn't doing couch to 5k, but I had got quite into running in the sort of latter period of the Starmer government and was feeling quite pleased with myself and starting to even see the result on the unflattering camera through which I do these podcasts. And then political turmoil is terrible. So I've barely run since Wes Treating resigned as Health Secretary.
- [40:40]
Oh, well, hopefully see you pounding the pavements of East London soon. Well, you know, talking of running, that's my 100 days challenge. I'm trying to do 500k in 100 days.
- [40:51]
That is very impressive.
- [40:52]
So so far I've done 30.51km.
- [40:55]
Wow. So there's in how many days?
- [40:57]
In eight.
- [40:58]
So you're not quite on track?
- [41:00]
No, no, thanks. Yeah, thanks for that. I mean, fair enough. After the Mastermind ambush. Yeah. So I do have to pick up the pace, literally. Henry, thank you very much.
- [41:08]
Thank you, Adam.
- [41:08]
Speak soon and I will be back with another episode of Newscast very soon. Bye bye. Newscast.
- [41:14]
Ashley Akonetti
Newscast from the BBC, you've come to
- [41:16]
Adam Fleming
the end of Newscast. Some people, and you know who I
- [41:19]
mean, might say you ooze stamina.
- [41:21]
Can I encourage you to subscribe on BBC Sounds? And you can get in touch with us anytime. Email us@newscastbc.co.uk, you can WhatsApp us on 030112 39480.