Hospice UK unveils plan for hospice funding in England
09 October 2025
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Hospice UK is today launching a new four point plan for fair funding for hospices, as it releases data revealing that 57% of hospices ended the last financial year in deficit, with 20% recording a deficit of over £1m*.
The figures, gathered as part of Hospice UK’s financial benchmarking with member hospices, show that hospices in England are on the brink. Surging costs have led to many services being cut back – just as demand is rising, fast, because of our ageing population. The situation is not sustainable – and time is running out.
In response, Hospice UK is calling for full funding of specialist palliative care provided by hospices, as part of a set of reforms to ensure to nobody misses out on end of life care as a result of insufficient hospice funding.
Toby Porter, CEO of Hospice UK said: “We’ve been ringing the alarm on hospice funding for some time, yet too many hospices are still struggling to cope with the rising cost of providing their essential care. 16 hospices have already made significant service cuts, and our data shows 2 in 5 of all UK hospices are planning to make cuts this year.
“This cannot continue, we need a long-term solution to hospice funding to ensure dying people get the care they need. This starts with full funding of specialist palliative care provided by hospices. With assisted dying on the horizon this could not be more pressing. The time to fix hospice funding is now.”
Hospice UK remains neutral on the principle of assisted dying, but the organisation is clear that no one should feel they need to choose an assisted death because of a fear of not getting the care they need at end of life. Well-funded hospice care is a critical safeguard if assisted dying is introduced.
This comes at a time when demand for end of life care is increasing, with a 25% rise in need projected by 2048**. Earlier this year, the Government laid out their Ten Year Plan for Health, which set out a vision of a neighbourhood health service in which people with long-term illness, including those approaching end of life, are looked after primarily at home, or in health centres close to them.
The Ten Year Plan identified hospices are part of this shift to move care into the community. Hospices are expertly placed to do this, but right when they should be expanding their services, they’re shrinking.
The number of hospices reporting a deficit has been steadily ticking up year on year. 43% recorded a deficit in 2022-23, following by a staggering 62% in 2023-24. The 2024-25 figure only dipped slightly due to an emergency £100m of additional funding for English hospices announced by the Government in December.
Porter added, “We hugely appreciated the additional short-term funding Government awarded to hospices in late 2024. This was a significant help. But unless there is bold, long-term change to how hospices are funded by the NHS locally, hospice services will inevitably fall back even though demand for them is rising due to our ageing population. This will run directly counter to the vision for more care in the community laid out in the Ten Year Plan for Health, even though hospices have the expertise to deliver it.”
Currently, hospice funding is inconsistent and does not bear relation to local need. To tackle this, Hospice UK is launching its four point plan for fair hospice funding. Alongside full funding of specialist services, the plan includes proper NHS contracts for hospices, funding to cover the cost of NHS pay rises for hospice staff, and national accountability for equitable provision of palliative care, wherever you live.
The charity argues that these changes would stem the wave of cutbacks to hospice services we have seen in the past two years.
They would open up significantly more community palliative care capacity to underpin the government’s vision for neighbourhood based care – allowing hospices to better meet the growing needs of our ageing population.
And they would help guarantee, as a critical safeguard in a future assisted dying service, that good quality palliative care was available for all who need it.
Barbara Anne Walker, Chief Executive of Ashgate Hospice in Chesterfield said: “For us, it's not like the public sector. We can't run deficit budgets year on year – charities simply can't do that. At Ashgate we have so many exciting plans for our future, and the future of our care services. We want to care for more people and make memories for them and their families. But at the moment, it feels that we are hand to mouth each year. We could do so much more if our long term funding was fixed."
Jeremy Lune, CEO of Prospect Hospice in Swindon said: “At Prospect Hospice, we are committed to strategically developing our care to fit the rapidly changing needs of our community. The reality however is driven by the fact that the funding we receive from the NHS doesn’t reflect this and has meant that rather than growing services, we have had to make reactive cuts over the last two years, including closing beds and limiting the number of people that we can support in the comfort of their own homes as they near the end of their lives.”
