Health secretary escalates opposition to mooted reform, saying it would have ‘resource implications’ for other services

Wes Streeting has been urged to provide “urgent clarity” on whether the hospice sector who have been hit by the rise in national insurance will receive extra funding.

The health secretary vowed to make an announcement before Christmas on whether the sector will recieve more money, and noted he “recognised the pressures” they were facing.

One of the reasons that I haven’t yet announced the allocation for hospices is I’m looking very carefully at what we can do through the hospice grant to recognise that pressure.

We’ll make an announcement on the hospice grant before Christmas because I recognise that people need to be able to make decisions about the next financial year, but the hospice grant will continue.

We need urgent clarity on what extra funding hospices will receive and whether it will fully cover the cost of the national insurance tax hike.

Many hospices are already on the brink and this tax hike risks pushing them over the edge. The simplest thing would be for the government to listen to hospices and exempt them from this tax rise.

We’ve got to start thinking differently. We’ve got to be able to talk with people about the things that matter to them while you’re doing the big macro stuff. It’s not one or the other. You’ve got to do both.

But if you don’t do the little things, you’ll end up with Farage as prime minister. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility. Reform came second to Labour in 89 seats. Nevermind the ones they were close to in terms of Conservative seats. We’ve got to get real, basically. We’ve got time but not a lot of time to readjust to a different world.

I think they’ve probably got six months. I heard somebody rather stupidly in the spring … from a policy angle brief that Labour’s policies were all ready, they’d all been signed off. It was a load of baloney. They had signed off generalities and macro but not the details of what was going to happen.

Bringing people in very quickly which Wes [Streeting] has been doing, the review of curriculum … those are important early moves that will have to lead to very rapid change because otherwise the government will run out of momentum. It just happens.