Speeches by Kinnock.

“Absolutely. I am very happy to do that—with pleasure.”

“Yes, absolutely. If you look down the list of stakeholders that we are engaging with for the modern service framework, we have people like the Social Care Institute of Excellence, Skills for Care, the National Care Association and the Care Association Alliance, so we have a whole range of key players.”

“Yes, I think that one of the reasons that there has been fragmentation and inconsistency in the delivery of services and in tackling inequalities is that there has not been a national set of standards and goals. That is what the MSF will seek to address. We know that improving services for underserved areas is an integ…”

“Absolutely. To take your point about the adult social care plan, we are not sitting on our hands and waiting for the Casey commission to report. We have done the uplift for unpaid carers, we are working on a revolutionary fair pay agreement for adult social care workers to address vacancies in the workforce, and we hav…”

“Let’s take GPs, for example. We currently have the GPwER—the general practitioners with extended roles—framework, which defines the skills, capabilities and standards to which a GP should be able to work when it comes to dealing with a patient who needs palliative or end-of-life care. That would be the basic building b…”

“The workforce plan is going to look at the different professions across every aspect of the workforce, so palliative and end-of-life care will absolutely be covered in that process. My colleague Karin Smyth is leading on the development of the workforce plan, and it is all being quite closely guarded until publication …”

“We accept that there is not good enough involvement, interface and integration with adult social care.”

“The independent Casey commission is going to report this year on its first piece of work to define the national care service—the standards and goals that we need to see through the national care service—and then, of course, there will be a second-phase report that will look more at the funding of adult social care.”

“We have the pharmacy quality scheme. Under the community pharmacy contract, pharmacies get certain payments, based on their quality criteria, one of which is palliative and end-of-life care. Do they stock the 16 end-of-life care medications? If they do, they qualify for that under the community pharmacy contract. They …”

“The Liberal Democrats were very pleased with that as well, I am sure. I also chair a cross-departmental working group with DFE, because of young carers; DWP, because of exactly the social security dimension to this; and DBT, because of the employment side, and trying to encourage employers to have a more progressive ap…”

“Unpaid carers have a voice in the MSF. The name of the organisation escapes me now, but one of the main voices for unpaid carers is one of the voices in the MSF stakeholder engagement process. We are also very proud of the fact that we provided the uplift to carer’s allowance, which was the largest uplift since the sch…”

“Yes. If you measure it on the basis of whether a person is on the register of palliative care, there are about 345,000 people on the register of palliative care. That is only about 50% of the total number of people in the last year of life, if we assume that, at any given time, there are about half a million people in …”

“I am very conscious of our parliamentary timetable. We have to be able to demonstrate very clearly by 2029 that we have seen a step change in improvements to palliative and end-of-life care in our country. By “step change”, I mean that people need to be confident that they will be identified early as being in the last …”

“National standards and goals.”

“The trend from the dashboard shows that the closer you are to the community, the less likely it is that you would have to go into emergency admissions.”

“It will be an update on the progress we have made. So far there have been five meetings between officials and the large number of stakeholders we are reaching out to. That will continue from January to April. There will be regional-level engagement to include systems and providers. In spring ’26 there will be an interi…”

“Yes.”

“The way to ensure that is to have a modern service framework that works effectively, with very clear national standards and goals, and with every ICB crystal clear on how they should be achieving those and on the vital role that hospices play. When you look at the statistics, I think about 40% of people die in hospital…”

“We are doing what we can to support hospices with the extra £25 million I announced earlier in this session, and the £80 million for children’s hospices. Clearly, hospices have that independent role, which I personally think is a good thing. Most hospices welcome it, because it gives them a lot of flexibility to provid…”

“There will be an interim report on it in the spring, and finalisation in the autumn.”