Children’s Hospices: Funding

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your guidance today, Mr Twigg. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne) for bringing this important debate to this place at this time and for making astonishingly good use of it. There is no doubt whatever that Zoe’s Place and the fundraising appeal will have been benefited materially from his putting this issue before this place, and therefore before the country and his community. I pay tribute to his community for their generosity.

I speak on behalf of the children’s hospice Jigsaw, which serves Cumbria, north Lancashire and the south-west of Scotland, and of Derian House in Chorley, which also serves some of my constituents. The scale of the heartbreaking reality of young people living with life-limiting conditions is mind-blowing. Nobody could fail to be moved by that reality and the impact on the families. It is worth also bearing in mind the immense compassion and professionalism demonstrated at Jigsaw and, indeed, all our hospices. It is true that there is a value in the hospice movement having independence and charitable status. It values that but there is a limit, and what we are looking at today is hospices, particularly children’s hospices, being stretched beyond the limit of their ability to raise the funds that they need to take care of the very poorly children whom they lovingly and so professionally do take care of.

The scale of the issue is worth bearing in mind. For the ICB that covers the southern part of my constituency, Lancashire and South Cumbria, there are currently nearly 3,500 people aged 0 to 24 years with life-limiting or life-threatening conditions. For the ICB for north Cumbria, which includes the whole north-east of England as well, the figure is more than 6,000. The money spent per head is £18.86 per child. If we think about the whole hospice movement serving Cumbria—St Mary’s at Ulverston, St John’s at Lancaster, Derian House, Eden Valley Hospice and Jigsaw—we are talking about the taxpayer, the NHS, being saved £33 million every single year because of the support that those hospices give in providing palliative and end of life care for people of all ages.

There is a particular thing that I want to raise about Jigsaw and the threat that it faces. It is a relatively small children’s hospice serving a very large rural county. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) talked about the importance of hospice at home, for example. The support that Jigsaw gives families outside the hospice is also massively important. But in recent years, of course, inflation has had an impact on fundraising. Look at energy bills: there has been an increase of something like 30% in overheads for most children’s hospices, including Jigsaw. Also, of course, hospices need and want to compete with the NHS on the pay that they give their excellent staff, but they are not funded. When the NHS has a pay rise, each part of the NHS, generally speaking, gets the funding to cover it, but not children’s hospices, so we are calling for ringfencing and central distribution of the money to hospices and for increases if at all possible.

I want to say a particular word about the complexity of our communities. I do not want to overly criticise our ICBs, but we have a children’s hospice that serves two, and as a result, getting the money out of them can be very difficult. It should not be for children’s hospices to work so tirelessly to drag money out of the public sector and to raise so much from voluntary services when what they are trying to do is to provide compassionate, professional, end of life care for children. It is time today for the Chancellor to step up and fund our hospices, including Jigsaw, in a way that is permanent, reliable and sufficient.