Mr Burnham said the proposal was 'the start of the road' for improving public health

The Labour Party will this week issue a stark warning that the public can no longer expect the NHS to ‘do everything’ and people will have to take better care of themselves.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham will announce plans on Thursday to get half the country active by 2025 - claiming it is the 'key' to improving public health.

Mr Burnham told MailOnline: ‘In a century of rising demand, rising cost of health, it is the most cost-effective way we can give people the keys to their own health.

'People will have to take more responsibility for their own health.’

He added: ‘The NHS won’t be able to do everything. It’s maybe a message that people haven’t heard from Labour always.

‘There’s sometimes a sense that we can just do everything top-down to improve people’s health – well that’s clearly not the case in the 21st Century.

‘We have to send out a tougher message to people about saying, look, if we are all going to live to our 90s we have to take care of ourselves, if we are going to get the most out of life as we get older.

‘We have to be honest and say the NHS won’t be able to do everything.'

Mr Burnham is preparing to unveil a host of measures to improve public health - including better food labelling and legal limits on the amount of sugar in what children eat and drink.

He said: ‘Think about mandatory food labelling – there has been too long a debate about this. We just need to get on with this. You need a chemistry degree to read a cereal packet. This can’t come a moment too soon.’

It comes after Mr Burnham last night revealed plans to ban super-sized bottles of cheap cider in a bid to tackle teenage drinking.

The shadow health secretary wants to outlaw 'high-strength, ultra-low-priced white ciders' sold in three litre bottles.

Mr Burnham told MailOnline products like Frosty Jacks, White Ace and White Strike were fuelling under-age binge drinking and alcohol addiction and needed to be tackled.

The Labour frontbencher said the high-strength ciders were cheaper than they used to be – meaning children could 'cobble together' enough money to get drunk all nights of the week.

He said children as young as '11 or 12' were regularly boozing after school in a way their parents' generation would not have been able to afford.

Mr Burnham told MailOnline that rising demand for health services - as witnessed in the current A&E crisis - meant the most cost-effective way of keeping health costs under control was to get people active

Many ciders available at pocket money prices have an alcohol content of 7.5 per cent – well above the strength of mainstream cider products – costing as little as 20p a unit.

He said the cost and strength of cider made it 'very attractive to under-age drinkers, and it is also a major drink of choice for addicts and street drinkers'.

Mr Burnham said: 'These cider products are particularly used by children because of their low price and high strength.

'We've worked it out at 20p a unit. We're talking about which can be up to 7.5 per cent in strength but are retailing at £1.99 or less – and this is a two or three litre bottle.

'Young people can cobble together the money to get hold of them.

'What we are trying to signal [is that] coming in with a sledgehammer approach and just hitting everybody – that just loses people. They think why is everyone being punished – what's fair about that?'

He added that the proposal was 'the start of the road'.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham wants to outlaw 'high-strength, ultra-low-priced white ciders' sold in three litre bottles

But Mr Burnham all-but admitted he had gone boozing with his friends as a teenager.

The former health secretary said: 'I think we all grow up, don't we, and we learn as we go.

'I wasn't whiter than white in that respect. I did normal things that teenagers in the North West do.'

Mr Burnham pointed to a survey of white cider drinkers by Alcohol Concern which found 50 per cent saying they drank more than three litres a day, and 42 per cent saying they had been drinking it for more than ten years.

The shadow health minister is considering banning the sale of cider in bottles of more than one litre in size, or by taxing larger volume cider containers more heavily.

The party is also looking at proposals to create a new cheap cider tax to increase the cost of cheap booze.

A proposal to increase the minimum apple juice content that cider is required to contain will also be considered. This would increase the cost of producing white cider – forcing up the price in the supermarket.

Labour said the ballooning cost of treating alcohol related illnesses meant tackling problem drinking was essential.

The harmful use of alcohol costs the NHS in England around £3.5 billion a year and alcohol-related crime costs £11bn per year, the party said.

One in five children who drink now consume 15 or more units per week – twice an adult woman's weekly recommended limit.