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 merits of providing further financial support for hospices, in the context of (a) the cost-of-living crisis and (b) rising energy bills.

At a national level, NHS England have released £1.5 billion additional funding to integrated care boards (ICBs) to provide support for inflation, with ICBs deciding how best to distribute this funding within their system, including to palliative and end of life care providers such as hospices. This is in addition to the support provided by the Government through the Energy Bill Relief Scheme and the new Energy Bill Discount Scheme, which will run from April 2023 until March 2024 and continue to provide a discount to eligible non-domestic customers, including hospices.