Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to distribute the second tranche of hospice funding based on (a) levels of need and (b) areas of deprivation.

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. For this first tranche, individual hospice allocations were calculated based on the care expenditure of each hospice.

The second tranche of £75 million of funding will be available from April. We will carefully consider whether the allocation model needs to be amended for this second tranche of funding, and will set out further details as soon as possible.