Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what his policy is on the funding of hospices; and what levels of funding his Department plans to provide for palliative care in each financial year until 2025.

The vast majority of hospices are primarily charity-funded but receive some statutory funding from clinical commissioning groups (CCGS) for providing local services. The amount of funding varies between CCGs, but on average adult hospices receive approximately 30% of their overall funding from National Health Service sources. CCGs are responsible for determining the level of NHS-funded hospice care locally and they are responsible for ensuring that the services they commission meet the needs of their local population.

Children’s hospices tend to receive less statutory funding than adult hospices due to differences in their development and type of non-NHS supportive care they provide. Therefore, in addition to NHS funding for locally commissioned services, children’s hospices will receive £11 million in 2018/19 through the Children’s Hospice Grant, which is awarded annually and administered by NHS England.

As with the vast majority of NHS services, the commissioning of palliative and end of life care is a local matter, over which individual clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) have responsibility. CCGs are best placed to understand the needs of local populations and fund services to meet those needs from the overall resource allocations they receive.