Hospice and Palliative Care

Richard Foord Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

Hospices in Devon were already struggling before the Government’s Budget last autumn, which introduced a hike in employers’ national insurance. To talk first about the national picture, we have heard that a third of funding for hospices tends to come from the state, through the NHS. However, in Devon, it is less than a fifth. For Hospicare, a charity based in Exeter, the figure is 18%, while for Seton Hospice at Home and Sidmouth Hospice at Home, the figure is 0%; they do not receive any funding at all from NHS Devon.

Last year, I got together with Ben Bradshaw and Simon Jupp, the former MPs for Exeter and for East Devon. We put aside our political differences—Simon Jupp and I were contesting the seat of Honiton and Sidmouth at the time—wrote to the chair of NHS Devon, the brilliant Sarah Wollaston, and secured an extra £500,000 for hospice care in Devon. None the less, the charity Hospicare still has a deficit of £2.5 million per year.

Following the national insurance announcement last autumn, The Guardian reported in mid-November that Whitehall was considering options to relieve the financial pressure on hospices. It suggested that civil servants were weighing up the possibilities of offsetting the NI rise, funding hospice nursing staff directly, or setting up a “direct funding pot” for hospices. Following the announcement on 19 December and the Christmas gift of capital funding for hospices, it seems that the Government chose the direct funding pot for hospices. The problem with the additional capital funding is that a lot of hospices do not have physical buildings. They do not have infrastructure. They provide nursing services and hospice at home, so they cannot simply offset day-to-day spending with that capital spending. They are completely missing out, and that is the experience for Seaton hospice at home and Sidmouth hospice at home services in my east Devon constituency.

In conclusion, these charities step in where the NHS does not. Providing care is central to the Government’s vision of shifting treatment from hospitals to communities, yet the current trajectory seems to be forcing patients back into overstretched, acute hospitals.