Sharon Graham interview: ‘National Care Service should be paid for using wealth tax not ending triple lock’

Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite the Union, the Labour Party’s biggest financial backer, has said that while she welcomes the Prime Minister’s intention to create a national care service, free at the point of use, she doesn’t think it should be funded by ending the triple lock but rather through a wealth tax.

Andy Burnham told Labour conference this week that he would end the existing state pension triple lock from 2030 to help fund a new national care service.

Burnham’s plans would see the state pension increase every year at least by inflation or 2.5% – but remove the automatic annual link with average earnings.

The state pension rates currently rise every April by either inflation, earnings growth or 2.5% – whichever is the highest.

He told conference: “The state pension will continue to rise every year at least by prices or 2.5%. And it will hold its value relative to earnings over time so that pensioners will always share in the rising prosperity of the nation.

“But this change will generate significant savings which we will use to build up our national care service.”

In an interview with LFF, Graham said: “I think we should have a national care service, I completely agree with that, free at the point of use, it could be groundbreaking, a 1945 type thing, fantastic.

“I don’t think that it should be pensioners that should pay for that, I think it should be done by a wealth tax.”

Burnham has said that social care in England is “as unfair as American healthcare, where the most vulnerable in society can lose everything, they can be wiped out”.

Asked about Burnham’s conference speech in which he laid out his programme for government, paving the way for greater public control over housing, water and energy services, and potentially reforming the UK’s electoral system, Graham said she agreed with the Prime Minister’s diagnosis of how Britain got to where it was after 40 years of privatisation wrecked the economy.

However, she cautioned that now was also a time for ‘some meat on the bones’ and for immediate measures to help the public with the cost of living crisis.

She said: “We do need to get some meat on the bones and I think it needs to be looked in two ways, firstly immediate, because people  will be looking for some immediate relief from the cost of living crisis and I really think we need to start looking at thresholds, because we’re dragging people into tax thresholds that they should not be in, so you’ve got nurses, train drivers, in the 40% and you’ve also got others like pensioners and other people being pulled into 20%.”

With the budget set to take place next month and Burnham warning of some difficult choices having to be made, Graham said she hoped it wouldn’t be the working class who paid the price.

“The working class have paid for way too long, since the 2008 crash and Covid, there’s nothing left for the working class.”

The unite boss once more pushed for a wealth tax, and argued against detractors who claim that it would be too hard to implement.

“It amazes me that whenever we raise the issue of a wealth tax, people recoil in pain, they seem to be very easily taxing working class people”, she said. 

“We’ve just frozen the tax thresholds since 2022, the Tories did it but we’ve continued it on and it always amazes me that whenever we talk about a wealth tax some say it’s too difficult we couldn’t do it, but when talk about taxing working class people it’s a breeze.

‘Of course we can tax wealth it’s very simple to do and we’ve given very many examples of how that would be done, the richest 1% just tax 1% more would bring in £25bn in one year, there are ways to do it and we should do it.”