SUPPORT FOR CHILDREN'S HOSPICES IN ENGLAND

That this House notes that across England, 40,000 babies,·children and young people with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions rely on palliative care to enhance their quality of life, manage symptoms and provide their families with much needed help and rest; expects demand for children's palliative care to grow as the number of children with life-limiting conditions increases; is concerned that the funding for services has not kept pace with this demand and has become a postcode lottery; further notes the NICE calculation that investing £12.7 million in end of life care for infants, children and young people, would release non-cash savings worth £34.7 million back into the NHS in England and therefore calls on the Government to increase the Children's Hospice Grant to at least £25 million per year, which would cover 14 per cent of the cost of the clinical care provided by children's hospices, equal to the contribution originally made by the Department of Health in 2006; and urges the Government to address the funding disparity between children's and adult hospices, whereby children's hospices currently receive only 22 per cent of their funding from statutory sources, compared to 33 per cent in adult hospices and put in place a funded children's palliative care strategy to ensure that seriously ill children can access the care and support they need, when and where they need it, in hospitals, children's hospices and in the community.