Hospice Funding

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Members for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart), and for Darlington (Peter Gibson), on securing this important debate, with cross-party support. The debate is a time for us to thank all the people who work in hospices in our local communities.

Hospices have touched so many lives in all our constituencies. St Gemma’s hospice in Leeds serves my community and has a special place in my heart because my grandma, mum and auntie all received care there before passing away, and the staff did a fantastic job. It was 20 years ago last month that my mum passed away there. Looking at the St Gemma’s hospice Twitter feed this evening, I saw that a friend of mine, Liam Raftery, who was a fantastic musician in a Leeds band called The Latchicoes, passed away there at the age of just 30 in 2017. I did not realise that it would have been his 37th birthday yesterday until I saw the St Gemma’s hospice Twitter feed.

The work that hospices do touches all our lives, and they do a fantastic job under incredibly difficult circumstances. St Gemma’s cares for over 300 people every day, and around 2,000 patients each year, but as we have heard from various speakers tonight, funding is a huge issue. St Gemma’s funding from the NHS covers less than 30% of the total hospice needs, so we need core funding on a sustainable basis. St Gemma’s hospice is budgeting for a deficit of over £500,000 in this financial year, which is why it has had a fundraising drive online over the last 48 hours. If people donated to St Gemma’s hospice before 8 pm tonight, their donation would be matched—in other words, it would be doubled.

I was delighted to see that, due to the generosity of people in Leeds, the hospice more than exceeded its target of raising £200,000 in just 48 hours. That shows how valued the hospice is in our community, as well as the generosity of local people. When I last went to St Gemma’s hospice and met the chief executive Kerry Jackson and her team, one of the things they made clear, and are still making clear, was that fundraising drives in general are becoming harder and harder to do. That is because of the cost of living crisis. People want to give but they cannot necessarily give as much as they used to. The people who run and work at St Gemma’s hospice are clear that NHS funding is not sufficient. They say that it covers less than 30% of the total hospice needs, so we need to see a change.

People have mentioned the independence of hospices, and that is important. We cannot have a situation where the people working in and running hospices in some of the most stressful circumstances imaginable, at a crucial and painful time for those who are losing loved ones, are worrying not only about how to care for people in the last moments of their life but about funding.

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

Would my hon. Friend agree that the Government should provide an increased level of funding that is long-term sustainable to all children’s hospices, including Claire House and Zoe’s Place in Liverpool, West Derby, which provide magnificent and crucial support for everybody in West Derby and beyond who needs it?

[Richard Burgon]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He has spoken to me before about the hospices in Liverpool and how they serve the people of West Derby, and he is correct to say that sustainable, reliable and sufficient funding is needed—especially as we are seeing increased demand—if the hospices that Members on both sides of the Chamber have celebrated tonight are to continue to provide the service that is needed by the people in our communities.

I want to end by saying thank you to each and every person who works at St Gemma’s hospice in Leeds, to the team who work there day in, day out, and also to the people in Leeds for their generosity. Even in tough times, they are donating and raising money for St Gemma’s hospice. Long may it continue the fantastic work that it does, but we need to ensure that sufficient core funding is provided so that it can do that work more easily in the decades to come.