Andy Burnham has told the “the NHS will collapse” if social care is not reformed but said he could not put a timeline on changes.
In his first major interview since becoming prime minister, Burnham said he would not want to leave office without bringing in “substantial change” to the social care system.
The prime minister also suggested making it harder to claim benefits, saying the country had to get serious about getting the welfare bill down.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has meanwhile written to the prime minister, saying he should rule out tax rises or increased borrowing to fund social care reform.
Burnham told the that if the government did not reform social care, the NHS would “collapse under the weight of trying to care for people who’ve really not needed to end up in the NHS system”.
But pressed on whether he would create a new system before the next election, he said he “couldn’t put a timeline on it right here, right now”, though he would put “whatever political capital I have into fixing broken social care”.
Burnham first proposed a universal system of social care in England in 2009 when he was health secretary under Gordon Brown and pursued the idea of a compulsory levy to fund it.
That Labour government also floated the idea of allowing people to defer the payment until after they died, which led to the Tories branding it a “death tax”.
Burnham is due to make a speech on adult social care on Wednesday.
The understands the PM will stop short of unveiling plans for a new system in this speech, instead announcing he is speeding up the Casey Commission, an independent review that has been considering possible solutions for social care.
Baroness Louise Casey is not expected to give her final recommendations until 2028, but Burnham wants to bring her schedule forward.
Adult social care provides state support to help people live more independently, including assistance at home.
Unlike the NHS, social care is not free at the point of use. In England and Northern Ireland, people with savings worth more than £23,250 are not entitled to help with care costs from their council.
In Wales and Scotland, different rules apply in terms of eligibility.
Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of healthcare think tank the King’s Fund, said the current “punitive system” meant that “quite a lot of people go without care that they need”, with one in seven paying in excess of £100,000 for social care.
While Burnham has not yet outlined any plans, Woolnough told the Radio 4’s Today programme that reforms could range from making social care free at the point of need to placing a cap on the amount people spend.
“The PM has for a long time mooted the idea of a social care system similar to NHS,” she said.
“It would be expensive but on the scale of what we spend on other public services – around £200bn on the NHS – we are talking for some of these options low billions per year.”
Adult social care has proved a complex issue to tackle for successive governments.
Two years ago Sir Keir Starmer was criticised when Labour scrapped plans for an £86,000 cap on the amount people in England would spend on social care in their lifetime.
Badenoch wrote in her letter to Burnham that “any solution to the issues around social care must also be fair to those who have made provisions and saved up over the course of their lives”.
Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP who chairs the Health and Social Committee, told the Today programme: “We do need to discuss where the money is going to come from but also we need to all be putting our political capital into this.”
Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said he was ready to do “whatever I can to find a real and lasting consensus on social care”.
“Family carers must be at the heart of any new system, everyone must get the care they need and no one should lose their home as a result,” he said.
Reform Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick said social care needed fixing but warned the party would fight any proposal for a “universal death tax”.
He said: “It’s not fair to raid people’s life savings and drags hundreds of thousands more families into paying tax when their loved ones pass away.”