Social Security
Debate between Paul Holmes and Meg Hillier(1 week, 4 days ago)
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Dame Meg Hillier
Let me continue for a moment. There are budget challenges this year, and many decisions that were made in recent Budgets will hit the public finances in 2025, 2026 or beyond, because there was either huge optimism about the state of economic growth or a deferral of painful cuts. Different Members of the House will have their own views.
Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member on the post to which she has been elected. She has just outlined a number of projects for which public money needs to be found. As the shadow Secretary of State outlined, the Government’s decision today will save £1.1 billion, and the replacements they are putting in place will cost £3 billion. How does that make economic sense, and how does it help the case that she is making?
Dame Meg Hillier
I give credit to the hon. Gentleman for his chutzpah in coming to the House today to say that it is this Government who have denuded pensioners of income. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) highlighted, the previous Government have a track record in that area, and there are 880,000 pensioners who, on the hon. Gentleman’s watch, deserved pension credit but did not get it. Those pensioners have lost out on £3,900 a year, in some cases for many years, because the last Government fell down on the job. They protected some pensioners, but not all. Where was the urgency then? These are crocodile tears when those people were suffering, but it is right that pensioners should get what they are entitled to, and pension credit is not being abolished by this Government. Rather, it is being promoted to make sure that the very poorest pensioners get that income.
One of the things that is absolutely apparent is that we cannot take this issue in isolation. We have a Budget coming on 30 October, and knowing what I knew a few months ago as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee and what I know today, I am not going to change my tune about the dire state of public finances. However, we face a second challenge: at the same time that our public finances are in that dire state, many of our citizens face the same challenges in their personal finances. This Labour Government are rightly committed to growth, but that will require an approach to taxation that helps ensure growth. We will therefore hear many arguments about the need for a taxation system that will underpin growth.
Hospice Services: Support
Debate between Paul Holmes and Meg Hillier(1 year, 3 months 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.