As the Shadow Minister for Health, one of the issues that professionals from the primary care and hospice sector keep raising with me is the increases to National Insurance tax that they’re going to have to pay from April.
They argue that money is being taken off them, only for the Government to be giving back in a way that they wouldn’t choose (i.e. hospices can only use the money the Government is giving back to them for building and projects, but not to cover increased staffing costs or resulting cuts to services).
You can see part of my speech on the impact of NICs changes to the hospice sector here.