Speeches by Kinnock.

“Yes.”

“Absolutely. That is what the modern service framework will be about—and our approach to strategic commissioning, because strategic commissioning will not work unless you are using the data properly. It is a population health management approach, and you cannot develop a strategy unless you really have that data. On dat…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“The palliative care dashboard. I would be very happy to share more information about the dashboard with the Committee. I might ask Dr Mitchell to talk a bit about that, as she is very much leading on the clinical side. The dashboard is a powerful tool because it provides an ICB-by-ICB breakdown; looks at how many peopl…”

“I do not want to make too much of a political point here. The reality is that when we came into office in July 2024, I looked across every aspect of my portfolio—general practice, pharmacy, dentistry, palliative and end-of-life care, adult social care—and, frankly, it was a pretty chaotic disaster across every aspect o…”

“I think there are tools that are not being used properly.”

“I get regular updates from officials, and I am pretty sure they will wheel me in at some point, but not yet.”

“National standards and goals.”

“It is absolutely clear that there is unwarranted variation—it is patchy. There are pockets of really good practice, but certain socioeconomic groups and geographical areas of the country are underserved. We absolutely acknowledge that. Part of this is to do with the integrated care boards, which have a statutory duty t…”

“I don’t, no. It is officials and stakeholders—”

“I don’t want to pre-empt it. It is so important that we co-produce it with the stakeholder group. Five meetings have already taken place. I think there will be an answer to that question when we do the—”

“I have not yet done the modelling of what kind of workforce would be required to staff that telephone line, but it would be a single central number. One assumes that it would not have enormous staffing issues. Its round-the-clock nature would require some thought to make sure we staff it properly. There is no point in …”

“A big part of it is because of the stakeholder engagement that we have got through it. There will be an entire system to come behind it. It is not just something that we are developing in isolation. The other thing is that we have identified that there is too much fragmentation, with each ICB going off and doing its ow…”

“I think it is because it is part of a systemic shift, which is set out in the 10-year plan. The MSF will not exist in isolation from all the other change that we want to deliver. That is articulated in the 10-year plan, and that makes it very clear to the entire system. I do think that the entire system has understood …”

“The workforce piece is complex because so many people are involved in palliative and end-of-life care, such as GPs, district nurses and specialist doctors.”

“Yes, absolutely. I am very happy to do so.”

“On the children’s hospices side, that was revenue funding, so that is for staffing. But on the adult side, our view is that when you look at the ledger for any hospice, and the income and expenditure it has, if you can help with expenditure on the capital side—those projects about fixing the roof that have never happen…”

“Let me say two things. You raised a really important point about whether the money is going to the communities and parts of the country that need it the most. We are looking at the funding formula—the core allocation formula—for ICBs, to ensure that it is aligned with socioeconomic need. Another example of that is the …”

“If we get the modern service framework published by the autumn, then we would be looking at implementation in 2027.”