Hospice Funding and the NHS Pay Award Debate
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Chris Green
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Hospice Funding and the NHS Pay Award
Chris Green Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered hospice funding and the NHS pay award.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I welcome everyone to the debate. It is half-past nine in the morning, and the good number of people attending highlights the importance of, and interest in, this subject. I am pleased to have been able to secure the debate.
When the Government announced that they would give our hardworking national health service staff a pay award that freed them from the constraints of the 1% public sector pay cap and was definitely higher than the pay freeze that many NHS staff have endured since 2010, I—like many MPs, I am sure—was very pleased for those staff, especially as I used to be one of them. When I worked as a clinical scientist in the NHS, I saw my take-home pay reduce year on year from 2010 to 2014, at which time I was elected to this place.
My message is certainly not that our hard-working NHS staff do not deserve this pay award; they deserve it, and more. The question is how the pay award will be funded by the charitable sector that is commissioned to provide NHS services. In April this year, I was contacted by the chief executive of my local hospice, Springhill, which provides end of life care to my constituents in Heywood and Middleton and to the wider borough of Rochdale. I am pleased to see my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd) in his place; while the hospice serves the whole borough, it is in his constituency, and I am sure he will have a useful contribution to make.
The chief executive of my local hospice raised three issues with me. The first was whether the Government have considered the impact of the increases in NHS pay on the hospice sector.
Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)
This is an incredibly important topic for debate, not least for Bolton Hospice, which is just outside my constituency. Does the hon. Lady agree that the pay increase causes problems not only in staff retention, but in the recruitment of new staff? We need very dedicated and skilled nurses to work in our hospices.
Liz McInnes
Of course I agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I will go on to talk about recruitment and retention and the problems that this issue is causing to our hospices in Bolton, in Rochdale and, I am sure, up and down the country.
The chief executive raised three issues with me; I have outlined the first, but the second was whether the effect of the pay increase on voluntary sector hospices had been calculated. The third point was whether voluntary hospices would be able to access additional Government funding to be able to afford the NHS pay increase.