Hospices facing cost pressures

We have been highlighting the impact of the cost of living crisis on hospices at a national level and calling on the UK and devolved governments to provide further financial support for hospices.

• We’ve spoken up for hospices in the media to raise awareness of this issue and put pressure on both national and regional decision makers. Coverage so far has included The Sunday Times, BBC Breakfast, Sky News, The Guardian, The Independent, the Daily Express, Channel 5 News, Times Radio and LBC.
• We asked members of the public to call on their MP to support the campaign using our write to your MP tool. Over 4000 people supported the campaign in this way. 
• Many hospices have reached out to their local MPs to ask them to support the campaign and make interventions in Parliament. We have found that MPs contacted by a local hospice have been a real asset to building momentum behind the campaign in Westminster.
• We’ve asked supportive MPs and Peers to write to the Chancellor and raise the issue in Parliament. So far, we have secured support from 120 MPs and Peers, of which, 52 wrote to Ministers to raise the issue with Government directly and 26 spoke in a debate on support for the hospice sector in June.
• We’ve met with the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury and the  Minister for Energy Consumers and Affordability to discuss the high energy bills facing the hospice sector. Using data shared with us by hospices, we were able to make a strong case for £30 million of Government funding to help hospices to pay their energy bills.
• We hosted a roundtable on hospice funding at Scottish Parliament with Miles Briggs MSP, which was attended by thirteen MSPs from across the major parties alongside representatives from hospices and both UK and Scottish Government and a family member who shared her experience of hospice care for her daughter. Following the meeting, 20 MSPs signed a letter to the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care.  
• We worked closely with Hospices Cymru and the Senedd Cross Party Group on Hospice and Palliative Care to advocate for greater cost of living support for Welsh hospices, resulting in the End of Life Care Funding Review recommending a £1 million cost of living payment to hospices.  

We know the cost of paying brilliant hospice staff is also rising, and we estimate it will cost hospices across the UK around £120 million extra for this year and next to match NHS salaries. Without government support, hospices will need to try to find these funds through charity shops, marathon runs and bake sales.

What we've been doing:

• We’ve been raising the issue in the media with over 200 pieces in national and regional news outlets showing the cost for hospices to keep pace with the NHS pay rise. All of our work in UK Parliament raising awareness of the impact of the cost of living on the hospice sector has also included raising the need for funding to help hospices keep pace with Agenda for Change pay rises.
• We met with the former Cabinet Secretary of Health and Social Care in Scottish Government to advocate for support for hospices to help them to pay rising staff costs as well as a new national funding framework for hospice care.
• During Hospice Care Week (9-15 October) we put hospice staff front and centre under the theme: ‘We are hospice care’. We know that hospice staff find it to be the most rewarding and satisfying job of their career, but we also know that there aren’t enough people to fill the roles needed to look after dying patients and their families. Without people to fill these empty roles, hospices will struggle to keep providing the gold-standard end-of-life care everyone deserves. That’s why, this Hospice Care Week, we supported you to celebrate everyone that makes hospice care what it is.

In response to our campaigning around the rising costs facing the sector, at the beginning of May 2023, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) asked us whether additional funding allocated to Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) in May 2022 for inflationary pressures had been passed on to hospices.

We surveyed hospices in England about any uplifts to local NHS funding in the financial year 2022-23 and shared this information with the Department for Health and Social Care to demonstrate the variation in uplifts to contracts across the sector.

Find out more about what inflation cost uplifts are, what hospices received and what hospices should have received.

We used Freedom of Information requests to gather data from Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) across England. 

Through this, each ICB shared their hospice funding allocation for 2022-23, and stated the uplift they had applied, or were intending to apply for both 2022-23 and 2023-24. The picture was varied and inconsistent, with many ICBs providing insufficient funding for the hospices in their area. 

We compared the actual funding hospices received with what ICBs should have allocated had uplifts kept pace with inflation, revealing a £47m gulf. This means that hospices have had a real terms cut in state funding over the last two years, whilst costs are rising steeply. 

Read the full briefing.

We shared this data with the Press Association, who ran a piece which was picked up widely in national outlets like Sky News, MailOnline, the Daily Mirror and the i Paper, plus over 200 regional outlets.

Thank you to the hospices who shared their story or spoke to the media for this piece. If you’re a hospice who is struggling with the impact of insufficient funding and would be willing to support our media work in future, please contact our press office.

Read our story.

We have been advocating for children's hospices in England on the need to continue the funding made available through the Children's Hospice Grant. We have been in close contact with NHS England and other stakeholders, and are working closely with our friends at Together for Short Lives. 

We’ve highlighted the importance of the grant in the media with the support of the Daily Express. Thank you to Forget Me Not Hospice and Shooting Star Hospice for your support with these pieces. We will continue to speak up in the media about the impact of the cost pressures on hospices.

We will continue speaking up for children’s hospices and update you as soon as there is any news from the Government about the future of the Children’s Hospice Grant.

We will continue to campaign on the impact of the cost of living crisis, including rising staff costs and energy bills, on hospices and make the case for Government funding for the sector.

We are ensuring that this issue is raised frequently in Parliament through parliamentary questions, in letters to Ministers and on the floor of the House of Commons.

We are also working with the APPG on Hospice and End of Life Care and supporting its new inquiry into statutory hospice funding in Westminster as well as the the Cross Party Group on Hospices and Palliative Care’s inquiry into the Future of Hospice Care in Wales.

Keep an eye on Hospice Leaders Briefing or contact our policy team for further updates.