Price caps aren't enough – we need to decide what we owe each other

VAT scrapped on electricity bills on day one. A £2 bus fare cap on day two. A "cost of living government" promised for the months ahead. Not bad for a first week, especially after the drift that came before.

But this is short-term relief for dysfunction that runs much deeper, and fixing it means asking more fundamental questions.

Burnham implied as much with his promised ten-year plan for the economy, and there are encouraging signs he means it. The open critique of neoliberalism, the case for public control of life's essentials, the emphasis on growth in every postcode: all point to a government willing to question assumptions that have gone unchallenged for forty years.

That's because, at its heart, the conversation forming around this government is about more than prices. It's about power, and how much say people have over their own lives. It's about the job given up to care for a parent because nothing else was available; the deposit never saved because the rent takes it first; the winter spent deciding which rooms to heat. When the essentials are unaffordable, it isn't just the books that won't balance. It's the life you'd planned that slips out of reach.

It is against this more pervasive sense of powerlessness that Burnham's government will ultimately be judged. Success means replacing an economic model that rewards owning over earning, prices the essentials beyond reach, and leaves whole communities waiting on decisions taken somewhere else.

So the question isn't just how to get bills down, urgent as that is. It's bigger: what should we guarantee one another? Where are we content to meet as customers in a market, choosing, comparing, switching? And where do we need to meet as citizens, with claims on each other?

Neoliberalism tilted the balance too far one way. Privatisation moved the infrastructure of everyday life (water, energy, housing, care) out of public hands, turning the essentials from a civic obligation into entries on a ledger. Prices crept up and quality fell as the new owners loaded these systems with debt, milked them for fees and dividends, and sent the bill to households with nowhere else to go.

But privatisation changed more than prices. It changed how we relate to each other. Where once we had systems that pooled risk - first in mutual societies, then through the state - we became consumers in every part of our lives. That mutual dependence has been stripped away, leaving each household to carry its own risk and buy its own access, alone. It's why bill support and price caps can't fix rip-off Britain on their own. They leave the machine intact and leave people facing it alone.

The essentials need a different footing: not the market's promise that you can always switch, but a shared promise that you'll never go without. That promise won't come free - there's no such thing as a free lunch. But the difference is that we cover the cost together. Everyone puts something in, through taxes, through work, by keeping an eye on the neighbours, and everyone can count on the guarantee when they need it.

None of this means abandoning markets – across most of the economy they do their job well enough. But the essentials are the exception. They should be held in common, paid for collectively, guaranteed for all.

At IPPR we call this reciprocism. It might sound utopian, even radical. But it's really common sense - we've done it for nearly eighty years with the NHS. Nobody gets asked at the door of A&E whether they can afford the ambulance that brought them in. And when pollsters ask what makes people proudest to be British, the NHS beats the armed forces, the Royal Family and Team GB. Not because it's perfect, but because it's the place where what citizens owe one another is still written into how the country actually works.

The ideas for rebuilding that reciprocity are already out there: community energy, co-operatively run care, land trusts that keep homes affordable. It's up to Burnham to use them to deliver a new economic project - one that gives us all a common stake in the things none of us can live without.

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Dr Chris Bick is a senior research fellow at IPPR.

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