Busiest Summer On Record. Their Answer Is Still Eight More Miles.
NHS England has just confirmed this was the busiest summer for A&E on record, and its own medical director says winter will be even harder — while our children's emergency care is still set to move eight miles further away.
Six months after the joint committee voted to move our children's A&E to Southport, NHS England has published the numbers for the summer that just ended. They confirm what anyone who has sat in a packed waiting room already knew: the system is stretched further than ever, right before it gets harder.
The numbers they just published
NHS England's own performance figures for June, July and August 2026 show 6.8 million A&E attendances over the summer — the busiest on record. August alone saw 2.16 million attendances, with just 76.3% of patients seen within four hours, against a 95% target the NHS hasn't hit in years. Attendances were up more than 240,000 on the same period the year before.
Ambulance crews weren't spared either. In August they responded to 730,000 incidents, including 73,000 category 1 calls — the most urgent, life-threatening kind. Even those patients waited an average of 8 minutes 3 seconds for a response, longer than the 7-minute national standard.
"An extremely difficult winter" — in their own words
This is the NHS's own assessment, not ours. Professor Stephen Powis, NHS England's national medical director, said preparations are already under way for "an extremely difficult winter with significant strain on urgent and emergency care." Rory Deighton of the NHS Confederation went further, warning that without immediate funding "there is a very real risk the NHS falls into crisis this winter."
This is the system NHS bosses want to send our children's emergencies further into. Ormskirk is already 10–20 minutes closer than Southport to the specialist centres at Alder Hey, Whiston and Aintree — hospitals that, by NHS England's own figures, are already missing their targets in a normal week, let alone a record-breaking one. Every extra mile is time a stretched ambulance crew and a stretched receiving hospital don't have to give.
We know the precise picture, and we're sticking to it
Ormskirk Hospital is not closing. The children's A&E is moving to Southport, eight miles away, at a cost of £33 million, with a target date of 2029. We say this plainly because precision protects credibility — and because the facts don't need exaggerating to make the case. Moving emergency care further away, into a system its own leadership calls headed for "an extremely difficult winter," is a decision that deserves proper scrutiny before a single brick is laid.
What we're asking for
The Health Secretary must formally call in the decision before any work begins. Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee asked for exactly that, unanimously and cross-party, back in March. That request has still not been answered. We love the doctors and nurses who keep Ormskirk's A&E running through weeks like the one NHS England just described. Our fight isn't with them — it's with the people who ignored 7,840 responses to a consultation and haven't yet answered a six-month-old letter.
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