Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Trefnydd – in the Senedd at 3:01 pm on 10 February 2021.

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Photo of Rebecca Evans Rebecca Evans Labour 3:01, 10 February 2021

Well, as Mark Isherwood says, hospices do provide an incredibly important service to the people of Wales and we absolutely recognise the enormous contribution that they do make. We worked alongside the hospice sector here in Wales to understand the particular financial support that they would need, and that's the reason why we've allocated £9.3 million with emergency funding to support those hospices throughout the pandemic, and this is being used to protect clinical services and strengthen hospice bereavement support.

And there's quite a simple answer, really, in terms of the consequential funding received, and it is very simple, and that is that the hospice sector here in Wales is smaller than it is across the border, so this is one of those areas where the consequentials were of a different order to the identified need that we have here in Wales. And I say, 'identified need' because we did work with the sector to identify the funding that it would require. And there are areas, of course, where we get consequentials from the UK Government that do not meet our need and where our need is much greater than across the border. So, we can't operate simply as a post box for consequential funding from the UK Government, we have to work with the individual sectors to understand the need that is identified. And as I say, when we worked with the sector, the need that was identified is the need that we have met, but clearly, if there's further discussion to be had, I would be more than happy to have those discussions with the sector.