Hospice Sector: Fiscal Support and Cost of Living

Bambos Charalambous Excerpts

Thursday 2nd March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) on securing this timely and important debate.

The work of hospices is incredible. I am lucky that North London Hospice has a facility in my constituency, as well as others in north London. The support it provides is absolutely essential, not just to people at the end of their lives, but to their family and friends. In my constituency, we have a wellbeing centre that provides therapies and counselling. We also have something called a death café, where people can talk about end of life. I was very lucky to know a constituent, Joy Watkins, who has sadly passed away now. She said that going to the death café enabled her to make choices about the end of her life. She could make choices about who to spend time with and about the finances that she would make use of at the end of her life. It transformed the way in which she handled the end of her life. The work of hospices is clearly incredible, and we need to celebrate it.

Hospices are very much part of the community. As the hon. Lady said, they rely on fundraising for much of their support. The statutory support from the clinical commissioning groups can range from 1% to 50%, and the rest of it has to be found through fundraising. Marie Curie said in its briefing that as much as 80% of hospices’ finances come from fundraising efforts such as marathon runs.

I do not know whether many people read in yesterday’s newspapers that a 13-year-old boy, Max Woosey, has raised over £700,000 for his hospice in north Devon by camping outside in a tent for three years. People make those superhuman efforts because they care so much about the services provided by hospices.

As has been the case for many charities, hospices have been hit by the cost of living crisis. People are tightening their belts because they are struggling to make ends meet, which has an impact on the amount of money raised by charities. It hits them hard because there is less money to go around, so they have to make savings. Hospices are different from most charities, however, because they have no choice about the support they provide. People are there to receive end-of-life care, and hospices have to meet their energy costs to provide that care. They also have to provide support through the specially trained hospice staff who assist people at the end of life. Clearly, hospices do not have any choice about whether they spend their money on energy bills, so they are in desperate need of support.

In my constituency, North London Hospice now faces an energy bill of more than £460,000 in 2023-24—an increase of £280,000. That is a huge amount of money, and it is more that can be bridged by any additional fundraising efforts. Although the energy bills discount scheme is welcome, it needs to be extended because, as I mentioned earlier, hospices do not have any other means of finding extra money. Fundraising is already very tight for hospices, so we need to make sure that we ask the Government for this funding. The Budget is only a couple of weeks away, and I hope that the Chancellor listens to our request.

There is also a wider argument, which I am not proposing to make today, about the funding for hospices generally. The service they provide should not just be a voluntary service that is topped up by whatever fundraising available. Hospices actually help the NHS by providing additional assistance. There should not be a postcode lottery whereby clinical commissioning groups choose to give hospices funding according to how they are prioritised in their areas. We need to look at the funding model for hospices.

Today, however, we are asking, in these very unusual and extreme circumstances, for the Chancellor to find additional money to support hospices, because it is some of our most vulnerable people who need their support. They are literally at the end of their lives, and hospices have no other way to receive funding. I urge the Minister—though it may not be up to him; it may be down to the Chancellor—to find the additional funding.

Before I close, I thank Hospice UK and Marie Curie for the excellent briefings they have provided for today’s debate. It is a shame that more Members are not present. I know that if the debate had taken place at another time, it would have been very well attended. I will leave it there, and I look forward to hearing from the Minister. I may have to leave before the end of the debate, so I apologise for that in advance, Mr Paisley.