Our CEO’s letter to Chancellor John Healey about the closure of shop and cafe in his constituency

Rotherham Hospice

14 September 2026

Dear John,

Thank you again for your personal response to my earlier correspondence about our Wath shop. I appreciated your handwritten letter and your understanding of the difficult position we were facing while consulting with our colleagues.

I am now writing to confirm, with great sadness, the permanent closure of our Wath charity shop and Swinton Café, with immediate effect. For Wath, which has remained closed during consultation, this confirms that the shop will not reopen.

These are heartbreaking decisions. I am asking for your support both as the MP for the communities affected and as Chancellor of the Exchequer, with the opportunity to address the financial pressures contributing to the loss of these valued community facilities.

As I explained in July, I personally asked our Board to defer an earlier decision to sell the Wath property because I believed we should explore every reasonable opportunity to secure its future. We changed its operating model, including converting it into a clearance store. Those changes improved performance, but low footfall left very little margin to absorb further costs. Our assessment was that the additional employment costs removed the remaining margin that could have made the revised model viable.

Combined with essential building maintenance anticipated in the coming years, those pressures have made continued operation financially unsustainable, despite Wath being the only retail premises we own and therefore not carrying a commercial rent.

At Swinton Café, rising costs and insufficient footfall have similarly prevented us from achieving the sustained level of sales needed to generate a reliable contribution to Hospice care.

I want to recognise the tremendous commitment of Lisa and Linda at Wath, Nicola at Swinton Café, and every colleague and volunteer who has supported these premises. Their hard work has turned our community’s generosity into care for local people. These closures are not a reflection of their dedication or effort.

Following consultation, voluntary redundancy arrangements have been agreed at Wath, alongside our work to secure alternative employment wherever possible. Our Wath volunteers have been supported to move to other shops, and the Swinton Café team has been redeployed to our other cafés.

For the people involved, these places have represented far more than work or volunteering. They have been familiar faces, friendships and a daily connection to their community. Their loss matters.

However painful, we cannot responsibly use money intended for Hospice care to subsidise outlets that can no longer cover their costs.

Charity retail is sometimes viewed as though donated goods and volunteer support make its income almost cost-free. Our experience is very different. Employment, energy, insurance, transport and maintenance costs must be met before a single pound can support care. A busy till is not the same as a financial contribution to the Hospice.

The increase in employer National Insurance, the reduction in the earnings threshold at which it becomes payable, and successive National Living Wage increases have added to those costs. Although the increased Employment Allowance offers relief to eligible employers, it does not remove the wider pressure on organisations such as ours.

Let me be clear: our colleagues deserve fair pay. This is not an argument for paying people less. It is an argument for funding essential care properly and recognising the cumulative consequences of government decisions.

A policy intended to improve people’s lives should be accompanied by support that prevents it unintentionally undermining the organisations those same people rely upon. Charities cannot indefinitely absorb higher costs, nor can we simply increase prices without affecting the affordability that brings people through our doors.

Government funding covers just 36% of Rotherham Hospice’s running costs. We must find the remaining 64% through fundraising, donations and the contribution from our shops and cafés. We are therefore being squeezed from both directions: providing care costs more, while raising the money to pay for it becomes harder.

Rotherham Hospice is rated Outstanding overall by the Care Quality Commission and has just been named Medium Charity of the Year at the 2026 Third Sector Awards. We are immensely proud of that recognition and of the people whose work it celebrates.

But an Outstanding rating does not pay a National Insurance bill, and an award does not close the gap between what care costs and what government contributes.

We are not asking government to fund an aspiration. We are asking it to help sustain outstanding care that already exists, and to enable more people to benefit from it.

The national warning is equally clear. In August, Hospice UK reported a combined deficit exceeding £70 million among 87 hospices participating in its financial benchmarking survey for 2025/26, more than double the previous year. It also warned that nearly six in ten hospices had made or were considering cuts to frontline services.

Against that background, I am asking you to support three practical measures:

1. Sustainable, multi-year funding for hospice care. Please work with health ministers to establish dependable revenue funding and fair contracts that reflect the actual costs of providing care, including staffing, and respond to growing need. Funding buildings and equipment cannot substitute for funding the people and services within them.
2. Targeted support with employer National Insurance costs. Please consider relief, reimbursement or other funded mitigation for charitable hospice providers, with appropriate support for the charity shops and cafés that help finance their services.
3. A proper assessment of the combined impact of employment-cost decisions. Before further changes are introduced, please assess their cumulative effect on charities and businesses operating on small margins, with meaningful consultation and funded mitigation or transitional support. Fair pay and viable employers should be supported together, rather than treated as competing priorities.

I would welcome a meeting with you and relevant Treasury and health officials to discuss these requests and share the financial evidence behind our decisions. I would also appreciate a written response setting out what action you are willing to pursue and the timescales for doing so.

In the meantime, our Manvers shop, Parkgate Superstore and Parkgate Clearance Store remain open, as do our other retail outlets. Crucially, our Swinton charity shop on the same precinct is not closing and will continue trading. Our cafés within the Parkgate Superstore and at the Hospice on Broom Road also remain open.

Your public encouragement for people to support these outlets, and charity retail more widely, would be greatly valued. Every purchase, good-quality donation and hour volunteered helps. But community generosity cannot be an unlimited substitute for sustainable public funding.

I intend to share this letter publicly so our staff, volunteers, supporters and the wider community can see both why we have taken these difficult decisions and what support we are seeking.

John, I would much rather be writing to you about how we can extend our reach than confirming the closure of places that have helped make our care possible. We have a responsibility to act when something is no longer financially viable. Government has a responsibility to recognise when its policies and funding decisions are making that viability harder to achieve.

Outstanding care needs sustainable funding, not just recognition. Please help us turn that principle into action for Rotherham and for hospices across the country.

Yours sincerely,

Mat Cottle-Shaw

Mat Cottle-Shaw
Chief Executive Officer