The hon. Member makes an excellent point. Long-term funding is absolutely essential if hospices, particularly children’s hospices, are to be able to plan ahead.

North London Hospice is reliant on donations from the community each year to fill its £10 million funding gap, as only a small proportion of its costs are funded by the NHS. Of course, the cost of living crisis continues to eat away at people’s finances, which directly impacts on our communities’ ability to provide the vital charitable support that hospices rely on. The reality of the current state of funding is that hospices are struggling to keep up with inflation and rising costs, which is leading to services being cut. However, demand for palliative care continues to grow—for North London Hospice, it has grown at a rate of 5% year on year. The costs of running hospice services, including energy bills and the cost of paying staff a fair wage, also continue to rise rapidly.

Hospices recruit from a small pool of staff in the NHS and care sector, but they are not provided with the same Government funding to meet NHS pay levels, meaning that many hospice staff are doing the same job as their NHS colleagues but being paid less for it. As a result, Hospice UK’s figures suggest an 11% growth in payroll costs this year, which means around £130 million of additional spending that is not met by increased statutory funding. As I have mentioned, those costs are not met with additional uplifts from NHS funding or contracts, and despite a legal requirement for ICBs to commission palliative care services that meet the needs of the local population, the funding that hospices receive from ICBs varies significantly across the country and means that charitable donations make up much of their income.