Speeches by Kinnock.

“It is an excellent question. When you have such a complex system, accountability is one of the most difficult things to achieve. For example, looking at the way the CQC works, if there is a local authority that is not doing what it should be in adult social care, it will go into special measures. It gets a “requires im…”

“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 think it is about 24%.”

“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 …”

“Every year, ICBs have to provide officials, and ultimately Ministers, with a report on how they have discharged their functions, based on the agreed targets that they have, the quality of patient outcomes and the quality of access—there is a huge panoply of targets and agreed outcomes that we have with the ICBs. Offici…”

“Yes, because the strategic commissioning piece of the MSF is, by definition, about tackling or improving services for underserved areas. What you are saying is, with the finite resource we have, where should that resource be prioritised? It is absolutely clear that it should be prioritised on underserved areas, whether…”

“That is going to be one of the key points in our modern service framework. We want to set national standards and goals, for example, by looking at having a 24/7 telephone line available everywhere in England at least.”

“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…”

“Absolutely. I see no downside whatsoever in getting to 100% on that.”

“National standards and goals.”

“We have to do it, and the point is that we are currently living in a world where the problem the system is facing, and one of the reasons we have such a huge elective backlog, is because we haven’t made primary and community care work as effectively as they should. We have to prevent avoidable admissions. Far too many …”

“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…”

“Yes, absolutely. Bereavement support is absolutely vital. We have things like universal principles for advance care planning. Advance care planning is the key to a lot of this because if you get that early identification to work then you start to have those conversations with the patient, their family and their carer s…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“Yes.”

“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 …”

“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 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…”