The families with the least will pay the most
National evidence shows children from the most deprived areas rely on A&E the most — and they're the ones this decision pushes furthest away.
Here's a fact the decision-makers never put on a slide: the children who use A&E the most are the children from the poorest homes.
That's not our opinion. It's national evidence. The Nuffield Trust studied emergency hospital use by children across England and found that children and young people from the most deprived areas were 58% more likely to attend A&E than those from the least deprived. For teenagers the gap was nearly 70%. For babies and pre-schoolers, over 50%.
So when you move a children's A&E further away, you're not moving it further from everyone equally. You're moving it furthest from the families who need it most.
This is one of England's most deprived health areas
The NHS body that signed off this decision knows exactly who it serves. On the government's official 2025 deprivation index, NHS Lancashire & South Cumbria ranks the 11th most deprived of all 42 health areas in England — and 7th worst on the health and disability measure. Nearly one in five of its neighbourhoods sits in England's most deprived 10%.
Across the Lancashire county area, 81,880 children — more than a third of all kids aged 0 to 15 — live in income-deprived families. And within West Lancashire, the county council's own analysis is blunt: deprivation is concentrated in Skelmersdale.
Skelmersdale. The town with no train station. The town where thousands of households have no car. The town whose children, under this plan, lose their nearest children's A&E to a hospital 8 miles further down the road.
They knew all this. They voted for it anyway.
None of this data is hidden. It's published by the government and the county council. Yet on 13 March 2026, a joint NHS committee approved spending £33 million to move our children's A&E from Ormskirk to Southport — after a consultation of 7,840+ responses in which keeping it at Ormskirk was the most popular answer.
A poorer child is more likely to end up in A&E. A poorer family is less likely to have a car to get there. Put those two facts together and the conclusion writes itself: this decision lands hardest on the families least able to absorb it.
We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. Our fight is not with them. It's with the decision-makers who looked at one of the most deprived health footprints in England and chose to move children's emergency care further away.
What we're asking for
Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee voted unanimously to ask the Health Secretary to call this decision in. West Lancashire's MP asked for it to be reversed. That request still sits unanswered.
The Health Secretary must formally call in this decision before any work begins. Every week of silence is another week the families with the least are left carrying the most.
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