Palliative Care

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) for securing this vital debate. Her knowledge, understanding and compassion for people are outstanding and cannot be matched.

Most people, when they are seriously ill, want to be at home, surrounded by the people who love them and whom they love. I know this personally from my own family’s experience. When my mother was dying, we were told that she had only a short time to live. She lived for another 22 days. During those 22 days, her hand was never left unheld by one of her children. Not once was she left alone. We laughed and talked, and we were able to be there with her. That experience stayed with me and all my family, and we treasure it.

However, not everyone has that support. Some people reach the end of life alone, and we have a duty as a society to care for them too. That is one of the reasons I helped to establish the Willowbrook hospice in St Helens. Like many hospices, Willowbrook was created by the community itself. It was founded in 1993 by people who, like me, believed that families in our area deserved the same compassionate end-of-life care as those anywhere else. Today it is a wonderful place, with beautiful surroundings and gardens, and care that focuses on comfort, dignity, compassion, and people’s family and friends. It is rated outstanding by the Cheshire and Merseyside ICB, and provides short-term in-patient care for people with complex needs, alongside outreach, outpatient care, therapy and education services. The hospice has supported more than 10,000 patients since opening its doors, and it now receives over 1,000 referrals each year.

Hospices exist to care for the individual person and their family. They give people a choice about where and how they spend the final part of their lives. They allow people to be treated not simply as patients, but as people—surrounded by family and friends, supported with compassion and dignity, and cared for in a way that recognises the humanity of those at the end of life. However, the reality is that, as charities, hospices are under enormous financial pressure.

At Willowbrook, around 30% of funding comes from the ICB; the remaining 70% must be raised locally. That comes from 10 charity shops in St Helens and Knowsley, donations, the occasional legacy gift and, of course, sponsored walks. It costs £3.8 million each year to run the in-patient unit alone. In a community that is not particularly affluent, raising that level of funding year after year is incredibly challenging. The hospice is currently facing a large deficit. If this pattern continues, it could be forced to close within five years. The annual increase from the ICB was 2.2% last year and is 2.3% this year, but it is dependent on efficiency savings. The increases do not keep pace with inflation and are confirmed to the hospice partway through the year, which is very late, forcing it to set its budget without certainty. In truth, it is operating on a knife edge. The solution must be fairer funding.

Patients who are medically fit for discharge, but who have no care package available at home, will be told that they do not meet the criteria for residing in a hospital, which is there for patients receiving treatment. Not many people know this until they get to that stage. There is no ready solution for people at the end of their lives if they are not receiving treatment in hospital or at home. We need funding for Willowbrook because it cannot meet the NHS nursing pay awards and is losing staff to NHS employers that can offer higher salaries, yet it is delivering NHS-commissioned care. The funding must reflect that reality, and it should pay NHS rates for hospice staff.

However, we also need wider reform. The Government must get down to facing our end-of-life care crisis. It is not good enough to finance existing hospices, although such finance is needed, because a holistic infrastructure must be developed. Hospices are established only where individuals have developed them; they are not equally distributed everywhere. That means we need a clear national strategy for end-of-life and palliative care, including a national service framework; better data to understand where care is needed most; clear goals for improvement; and proper palliative training and resources for health and palliative care staff.

Hospices such as Willowbrook show what compassion and end-of-life care can look like. Many people want that at home, and as I know, it can be provided at home, but without sustainable funding and a coherent national approach, such a service cannot continue to do the extraordinary work that so many families depend on and that the staff in nursing homes and hospices provide.