National Insurance increase to cost Marie Curie almost £3 million a year

Marie Curie, the UK's leading end of life charity, has written to Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting stating the recently announced increase to employer National Insurance contributions will cost the charity an additional £2.92million a year and warns that without further support, the only option left will be reduce services.

The letter from Marie Curie's Chief Executive Matthew Reed goes on to explain that this additional cost pressure comes on top of matching the NHS pay award by delivering a 5.5% consolidated pay increase awarded to all eligible colleagues working in clinical and clinical support roles.

The letter references the critical role palliative and end of life care can play in reducing pressures on acute services in the NHS.

Matthew Reed, Marie Curie Chief Executive, said:
"Day in, day out, across the UK, Marie Curie Nurses care for dying people in their own homes. We bring pain and symptom management, and dignity and respect, to people when and where they need it most.

"Increasing our National Insurance bill is simply counter-productive. It risks doing the exact opposite of what the UK Government is trying to achieve. If our services have to close to pay this extra tax, more people will end up in hospital when they don't need or want to be there.

"Our incredibly generous supporters did not donate their hard-earned money for us to simply hand it back to the Government in the form of a £3million tax bill."

The letter calls for urgent action to address the impact of increases in employer National Insurance Contributions on non-NHS organisations delivering services on behalf of the NHS. There is some precedent for action of this sort – since 2019 when employer contributions to the NHS pension scheme were increased, Marie Curie have received funding to cover the additional costs.

Sam Royston, Executive Director of Research and Policy at Marie Curie, said:
"Marie Curie is in a particularly unique position as a charity providing palliative and end of life services in people's homes on behalf of the NHS. We very much welcome the investment the UK Government have announced for the NHS, but if it wants to meet its key goals for NHS improvement, this investment also needs to reach non-NHS providers of NHS services like ourselves – so far we have seen only additional financial pressures with little sign of relief.

"Our services stop people at the end of life making endless trips in the back of an ambulance. They care for people in their homes when they would otherwise have to go into hospital. With as many as 30% of hospital beds occupied by people in the final year of life, it is impossible to imagine that the Government can succeed in its aim of shifting care from hospitals to communities without a focus on growing palliative care. Instead, without further support the only option we will be left with is reducing the services we deliver."

In Marie Curie's response to the budget last week, Matthew Reed said that: "Taxing healthcare charities is a tax on healthcare and a tax on donors." And that "The Health Secretary himself has acknowledged that palliative and end of life care is not good enough, so we are shocked by the lack of measures in the budget to fix it. Palliative care needs are projected to rise by 25% over the next 25 years, around 147,000 more people each year, yet this Government lacks a strategy to tackle the magnitude of this challenge."