Speeches by Kinnock.

“We are recruiting 8,500 more mental health workers by the end of this Parliament. The Mental Health Act 2025 reforms will ensure that people with a learning disability, autistic people and people with the most severe mental health conditions have greater choice and control over their treatment and receive the dignity a…”

“My hon. Friend is right that, although we are making progress on urgent treatment with the urgent dental access centre that he mentioned, there is a real challenge with new routine care in Hartlepool. We are looking to improve that unacceptable situation, which we inherited, by offering dentists £20,000 to work in unde…”

“My hon. Friend is right that NHS mental health, ADHD and autism services have never fully met the needs of the population in a tailored, personalised or timely way. The independent review into prevalence and support for mental health conditions, autism and ADHD will explore the current challenges facing clinical servic…”

“I don’t know the answer to that question.”

“No, but there has been about an 80% increase in the number of specialist palliative care doctors since 2010 and about a 5% increase since 2024, so there is some increase in the specialist workforce. I absolutely accept that it is not where we would like it to be, but it has been moving in the right direction.”

“We recognise that that voice needs to be heard. Obviously, local authorities play a crucial role in that. We have to ensure that local authorities are around the table as we develop this modern service framework. We also want to look at ways in which care workers can be more empowered. We are looking at delegation to e…”

“In specialist doctors?”

“There are two sides to the workforce in palliative and end-of-life care: the specialist side and the generalist side. On the specialist side, we have actually seen quite a significant increase in the number of specialist doctors. I believe we have 910 specialist palliative and end-of-life care doctors now, which is an …”

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

“I do not think it is necessarily about the quantum. If you look right across Government, we spend about £22 billion on people in the last year of their life. About £5 billion of that is on social security, about £5 billion is on adult social care, and the remaining £12 billion or so is in the healthcare side of palliat…”

“Thank you for that question. I think this pivots back to what I was discussing with the Chair earlier, which is that we have to make this happen because, otherwise, we are just going to see a prolongation of the status quo. The question is how to make it happen in a way that still enables the stability and sustainabili…”

“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 you are right that, as a country, we do not talk about death enough. For all sorts of perfectly understandable reasons, it has a certain stigma around it, and people do not talk about it enough. I think there are two sides to the coin: one is the system and the workforce, and the other is the public. It is…”

“Early identification is vital. I am pleased to see that, over the last year or so, we have had quite a good increase in the number of people on the palliative care register—I think it has gone up from 0.46% to 0.55% of the population. About 1% of the population dies every year—approximately half a million people—and th…”

“There was a report on bereavement in 2022 called “Bereavement is everyone’s business”. After that, the Department established a cross-Government bereavement working group to ensure better collaborative working across Government Departments. The question is the extent to which that working group is effectively improving…”

“Can I ask Dr Mitchell to add anything extra on the advance care planning question, because I think there may be more to say on that?”

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

“I think there are two issues. One is that we do not have enough people on advance care plans. That comes back to the identification point: 345,000 people are on the palliative care register; we want there to be more. You are not going to get an advance care plan until you are on the register, so the first step is to ge…”

“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 …”

“We have the “Universal Principles for Advance Care Planning”, published in 2022, which focus on the importance of providing opportunities for a person and their family or carers to engage in meaningful discussions, led by the person concerned, that consider the person’s priorities and preferences, including place of ca…”