Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of changes to National Insurance employer contributions on hospices in North East Hampshire constituency.

We have taken necessary decisions to fix the foundations in the public finances at the Autumn Budget, enabling the Spending Review settlement of £22.6 billion increase in resource spending for the Department from 2023/24 outturn to 2025/26.

The employer National Insurance contribution rise will be implemented in April 2025, and planning guidance published on 30 January 2025 sets out the funding available to integrated care boards and the overall approach to funding providers in the next financial year. It considers a variety of pay and non-pay factors and pressures on the providers of secondary healthcare, including charitable hospices.  Further information on the planning guidance is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/2025-26-priorities-and-operational-planning-guidance/

We are supporting the hospice sector with a £100 million capital funding boost for adult and children’s hospices in England, to ensure they have the best physical environment for care.

We are pleased to confirm that the Government has released the first £25 million tranche of the £100 million of capital funding, with Hospice UK kindly allocating and distributing the money to hospices throughout England. An additional £75 million will be available from April 2025.

In addition, I recently met the major palliative and end of life care and hospice stakeholders, and long-term sector sustainability, within the context of our 10-Year Health Plan, was discussed at length.