Hospice Services: Support
Debate between Meg Hillier and Paul Holmes(10 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Paul Holmes
The hon. Lady tempts me to come to content that I will cover later in my speech, but for now she can take it that I wholeheartedly agree, as do many Members here, I suspect.
No one will contest that our health and care staff deserve to be well paid for the incredible work they do, and in an ideal world we would see our life savers and carers never have to worry about their finances and pay, but it would be deeply irresponsible to facilitate pay rises without giving due consideration to the dramatic impact that rising wage costs have on these essential services. To give some specific context, Mountbatten Hampshire took over management of the hospice from the NHS in 2019. It has a contract with the NHS for roughly 35% of its costs, of which about £3.8 million comes from the local NHS commissioners in the form of an outcome-based contract. The hospice follows the NHS pay award each year to remain competitive and to retain and hire staff for its services, which means that the hospice has seen a 4.8% rise in costs this year and will see a further 5% next year, with no corresponding change in its NHS contract, leaving an increasing and worrying financial gap that the charity will find very hard to reconcile without public funding.
Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the hon. Member give way?
Several hon. Members rose—
Paul Holmes
I am spoilt for choice! I give way to the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier).
Dame Meg Hillier
It is interesting to hear about the Mountbatten, which I spent many years at when it opened, when I was a child. The hospice in my constituency, St. Joseph’s Hospice, is really cutting-edge, but the retrospective payment for nurses will cost it £470,000, and it cannot apply that yet because it has no certainty from commissioners about its funding. To keep it up will be another half a million a year, and it cannot afford that without certainty of funding. I am sure the hon. Member agrees that we need to press the Minister for some clarity on this.
Paul Holmes
I agree with the right hon. Lady; we do. In my experience, the uplift that has been given to local NHS commissioning groups is simply not making it through to those end of life services. I hope we will see some recognition of that from the Minister, and I am sure she will enforce this, to ensure that the funding to local commissioning groups gets through to these services.