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Vital Signs: Palliative & end of life care

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Who is shaping the debate on palliative & end of life care: in Parliament, in the press, and among the experts the press turns to.

See the 4 search terms behind this page ↓

02  Who is talking  ·  pick a lens

03  The signal  ·  Where it is spoken from

524

of 1,439 MPs & peers have spoken on palliative & end of life care since 9 July 2024 · 1,629 Commons contributions from 334 constituencies · latest sitting indexed 27 October 2026

0Hansard contributions per seat90

Seats shaded by Hansard contributions on this topic. Lines join the 10 MPs in this list to their constituencies; peers have no seat and no line.

#Most activeSignalScore
  1. 01—Danny KrugerReform UK · East Wiltshire · Commons270
  2. 02—Naz ShahLabour · Bradford West · Commons222
  3. 03—Kim LeadbeaterLabour · Spen Valley · Commons186
  4. 04—Stephen KinnockCabinetLabour · Aberafan Maesteg · Commons · Secretary of State for Wales177
  5. 05—Rebecca PaulShadowConservative · Reigate · Commons · Shadow Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport147
  6. 06—Karin SmythMinisterLabour · Bristol South · Commons · Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)90
  7. 07—Lewis AtkinsonLabour · Sunderland Central · Commons87
  8. 08—Kit MalthouseConservative · North West Hampshire · Commons78
  9. 09—Dr Marie TidballLabour · Penistone and Stocksbridge · Commons78
  10. 10—Jack AbbottLabour (Co-op) · Ipswich · Commons78

Score is a weighted Hansard contribution score for this topic since 9 July 2024. Portraits: UK Parliament Members API. Rank change (▲/▼) is vs. 7 days ago.

Hansard · weekly mentions

127 mentions in the last 8 sitting weeks, 44 in the 8 before

RecessJul 24Jan 25Jul 25Jan 26Jul 26185 · w/c 27 Jan5 · w/c 19 Oct

Recess weeks are not counted: sitting weeks are compared with sitting weeks, and the current week is left off until it is complete. Parliament was in recess 21 Sept to 11 Oct 2026. 2,540 mentions since 9 July 2024.

Press · articles per week

486 articles in 59 weeks, 140 of them in the last five

Jan 2026Jul44 · w/c 7 Sep

Source: Guardian archive, trade press and news search: a sample of coverage, not an exhaustive count. Weekly article counts to w/c 19 Oct; weeks not yet ingested are dropped rather than shown as zero.

Parliament · party split

Share of scored contributions

  • Labour220 members45%
  • Conservative155 members27%
  • Liberal Democrat69 members12%
  • Crossbench30 members5%
  • Others (13 groups)50 members11%

Labour members account for 45% of the scored contributions on this topic, across 17 party groups in both Houses.

Parliament · reach

Members who have spoken

524of 1,439 MPs & peers

36% of the roster has spoken on this topic since 9 July 2024: one square per member, 334 MPs (navy) and 190 peers (cobalt).

Briefing · Parliament

Palliative care is argued over as a test for assisted dying legislation and as a hospice funding problem

  1. In the Commons debate on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill on 11 September, opponents said palliative care must be fixed first. Josh Fenton-Glynn cited a Health and Social Care Committee panel finding a postcode lottery and a workforce crisis, and Marsha De Cordova said palliative and social care must be right before assisted death is debated. Shivani Raja and Jim Shannon said money should go to those services.
  2. Supporters of the Bill said the two aims are not alternatives. Lauren Edwards said Parliament can and must both improve palliative care and support assisted dying. Kit Malthouse said perfection cannot be a precondition for the dying, and Alicia Kearns said the Bill would require the Secretary of State to report on the state of palliative care. Layla Moran, who chairs the Health and Social Care Committee, said she did not believe palliative care would have been in the early batch of modern service frameworks without the Bill.
  3. Members also disagreed in that debate about what palliative care can achieve. Claire Hazelgrove described her mother's pain despite good palliative care, and Dr Peter Prinsley said assisted dying is complementary to palliative care. Dr Zubir Ahmed said failures are more often due to the absence of universally available palliative and psychological care, and Sir Edward Leigh said palliative care staff had told him pain can be controlled in the overwhelming majority of cases.
  4. Hospice funding came up in several settings. Peter Fortune (22 October) and Callum Anderson (3 September) asked for debates at Business of the House, and Jodie Gosling said Mary Ann Evans hospice in Nuneaton is in insolvency talks. In the Lords Health Bill debate on 13 October, Baroness Browning said some hospices have empty beds because they cannot afford to fill them. Noah Law, in the 11 September debate, cited National Audit Office figures on how far the sector relies on charitable income.
  5. Ministers pointed to work under way. Alison McGovern, speaking on 11 September, 15 October and 20 October, said a modern service framework for palliative and end-of-life care is being developed, alongside a national care service, and that she is looking at hospice funding. Sir Alan Campbell said on 3 September that the Government has provided £125 million of capital funding for hospices.

Verbatim

  • The report points to a postcode lottery of provision. Hospices are largely funded through charitable donations, which means that in better-off areas there is better care.

    Josh Fenton-Glynn · Labour, Calder Valley · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · 11 Sept 2026
    Read in Hansard (opens in a new tab)

  • But we must be careful not to say that perfection is a precondition for those who are dying; perfection has to be an objective for those of us who will carry on living. We cannot delay and indulge the dying in their agony because we are not satisfied with the state of palliative care.

    Kit Malthouse · Conservative, North West Hampshire · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · 11 Sept 2026
    Read in Hansard (opens in a new tab)

  • She had access to good palliative care, but what we learned the hardest of ways is that not all pain can be palliated.

    Claire Hazelgrove · Labour, Filton and Bradley Stoke · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · 11 Sept 2026
    Read in Hansard (opens in a new tab)

  • I was at a meeting earlier today on this very subject and was horrified to find that there are several hospices around the country with quite large numbers of empty beds—not because there are not patients for them, but because they cannot afford to fill those beds at the moment.

    Baroness Browning · Conservative, House of Lords · Health Bill · 13 Oct 2026
    Read in Hansard (opens in a new tab)

  • As part of that work, we expect all integrated care boards to complete a needs assessment so that we can get a detailed understanding of their current and future population, including people of all ages with palliative care and end-of-life needs.

    Alison McGovern · Labour, Birkenhead · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · 11 Sept 2026
    Read in Hansard (opens in a new tab)

AI-drafted from 106 Hansard contributions over 21 sitting days · 2 September 2026 to 22 October 2026 · No sittings were recorded between 18 September 2026 and 11 October 2026. · quotes are exact copies of the Hansard record, speakers taken from the record · generated 25 Oct 2026 · how briefings are made

Expert voices · press citations

The most quoted voices on this topic

40 of 213 expert voices, 101 citations across 5 groups. Click a group to open it as a lens on the map.

Clinicians

11 · 32 citationsOpen lens ↑

Academics

14 · 34 citationsOpen lens ↑

Sector leaders

12 · 30 citationsOpen lens ↑

Regulators & officials

1 · 2 citationsOpen lens ↑

Unions

2 · 3 citationsOpen lens ↑

Methodology

How Vital Signs ranks

Parliament. Every Hansard contribution on a topic since 9 July 2024 is scored by type and summed per member; the map colours each constituency by how often its MP has raised the topic. Peers sit in no constituency and are ranked but not mapped.

Press. Bylines rank journalists and quotations rank expert voices, across the Guardian archive and trade press Vital Signs has read. A voice’s pin marks its organisation’s base, never the person’s home.

Briefings. Drafted by an AI model from the underlying Hansard text or articles. Every quotation in a Parliament briefing is an exact copy of the Hansard record and linked to it; press quotations are as the linked articles reported them. The speaker is always taken from the record, not the model.

Search terms for Palliative & end of life care. These are the exact terms used to find what appears on this page.

Parliament: 4 terms

A Hansard contribution counts toward this topic when it contains any of these, matched as whole words.

  • palliative care
  • end of life care
  • hospice
  • terminal illness

News search: 4 terms, run each week

Each term is searched separately on Google News. Where a term only extends an earlier one (“cancer treatment” after “cancer”), it is skipped.

  • palliative care
  • end of life care
  • hospice
  • terminal illness

Guardian: 1 editor tag

The Guardian archive is read by its editors’ tags, not by keyword, so an article only counts if a Guardian editor filed it under one of these.

  • society/hospices

Trade press: 1 outlet

Read by each outlet’s own category for this topic, not by keyword.

  • Nursing Times
Read the full methodology →Check your MP’s record →

Profiles

More on palliative & end of life care

Voices in the press

Journalists