Marie Curie made almost 100 of its staff redundant at the end of June, it has emerged.
The end-of-life charity said the measure was necessary to safeguard its long-term financial sustainability as it navigates a tough operating environment, with commissioning income not keeping pace with the cost of delivering hospice care.
It warned that this was leading to an “overreliance on charitable fundraising to deliver hospice and hospice care at home services”.
The staff cuts at Marie Curie come less than a year after its annual financial report revealed that its employee numbers had swelled by more than 100 during the 12 months to 31 March 2023. At the time, it reported a deficit of £8.7m but said this was as a result of pursuing growth.
In all, the charity is making 99 out of 3,188 employees redundant, equivalent to about 3% of staff.
This week another national charity, Sue Ryder, highlighted increasing staff costs, including National Living Wage uplifts, and a 25% increase in the price of food, medical supplies and utilities as it published its annual accounts. Sue Ryder has also shed staff, divesting its neurological services.
‘Tough but necessary decision’
Matthew Tyler, Marie Curie’s chief financial officer, said the charity’s operating context had become “increasingly challenging”.
“While fundraising has been robust, the level of NHS funding we receive for our commissioned services is not increasing at the same rate as our costs to deliver high quality end-of-life care,” he said.
“To protect the vital care and support we provide to people at the end of life and ensure our long-term financial sustainability, we have had to take the tough but necessary decision to make some changes to the charity’s support functions,” he added.
None of the charity’s frontline clinical and patient-facing, information and support, or retail teams were impacted by the changes, Tyler said. Marie Curie did not answer questions from Civil Society about the specific teams affected by the cuts or what the redundancies would mean for service delivery.
“The way the hospice sector is currently funded is unsustainable. Something must change soon, or we will continue to see cuts in end-of-life care across the UK,” Tyler said. “Too many people are dying in unnecessary pain, in poverty, and alone, and it needs to stop. We need the new government to fix this urgent crisis.”
As the government considers the NHS pay award for 2024/25, “we would also ask for serious consideration to be given to how it will be ensured that any increases are fully funded for non-NHS providers of NHS services, like Marie Curie”, Tyler said.
“Failure to address this longstanding issue contributes to an overreliance on charitable fundraising to deliver hospice and hospice care at home services, and to an ever-growing postcode lottery in the availability of end-of-life care.”
From surplus to deficit
In its most recently published accounts, for the year ending 31 March 2023, Marie Curie posted a deficit of £8.7m despite benefiting from a record £44m in legacies.
The charity’s total reported income was £167.3m, slightly up from the year before (£165.8m) but down from 2021 (£170.6m).
In each of those previous two years, Marie Curie reported a surplus – £25m in 2021 and £12m in 2022. Between 2021 and 2023 its income from government grants dwindled from £22.7m to just £62,000, while income from charitable activities fell by more than £20m even as expenditure on those activities rose.
The 2023 report said the year-end deficit reflected “increased investment in growth across the full scope of our activity, with charitable activity spend increasing by 13% to £126.7m (2022: £111.7m)”.
Over that year, the average number of employees at the charity grew from 3,721 to 3,843 despite a national shortage of healthcare workers, thanks to a successful social media-driven campaign.
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