Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of the proposed increase to employers National Insurance contributions on hospices in Lancashire.

We have taken necessary decisions to fix the foundations in the public finances at the Autumn Budget, enabling the Spending Review settlement of a £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 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 that funding, with Hospice UK kindly allocating and distributing the money to hospices throughout England. An additional £75 million will be available from April 2025.

We are also providing £26 million of revenue funding to support children and young people’s hospices for 2025/26. This is a continuation of the funding which until recently was known as the children and young people’s hospice grant.