For Families Without a Car, Southport Is a One-Way Trip After Dark
The last direct bus back from Southport leaves before 9pm — but Ormskirk's children's A&E stays open until midnight, and families without a car have no way home in between.
It's 9pm. Your child's temperature won't come down. You don't drive. In Ormskirk, a short walk or a cheap taxi gets you to A&E. Move that department to Southport, and once the last bus has gone, you're stranded 8 miles from home with a sick child and no way back.
The last bus doesn't wait for midnight
Ormskirk's children's A&E runs 8am to midnight. NHS bosses say Southport can simply take on that workload. But the only direct bus linking the two towns, service 315, runs roughly hourly, and the last bus back from Southport leaves at 8:54pm, arriving into Ormskirk around 9:22pm, according to Stagecoach's published timetable. After that, a family who took the bus to Southport A&E has no bus home. Not at 10pm. Not at midnight, when the department they've been sent to is still meant to be open and seeing children.
That's not a rounding error. That's hours of the day when the "safe" alternative NHS bosses approved simply isn't reachable without a car.
This isn't a small problem
West Lancashire isn't wealthy everywhere. The 2025 Indices of Deprivation rank the borough 176th out of 296 districts in England, roughly mid-table, but Lancashire's own data shows pockets of the borough sit in the most deprived tenth of the country. Four of West Lancashire's wards are classified by national statisticians as "Rural Amenity" or "Spacious Rural Living" areas, where, Lancashire County Council's own insight team notes, poor transport choices leave residents with little option but to rely on a car they may not have. Across Lancashire as a whole, 22.3% of households have no car or van at all, according to the 2021 Census. For those families, "8 miles further" isn't an inconvenience. It's a journey they may struggle to make, and can't easily get home from.
Minutes matter, both ways
We've said it before because it doesn't stop being true: Ormskirk sits 10 to 20 minutes closer than Southport to the specialist children's centres at Alder Hey, Whiston and Aintree. Moving the front door further from those units, while also stripping out the direct evening transport link for families without cars, stacks two problems on top of each other. It isn't just further. For some of our neighbours, it may not be reachable at all outside daylight hours.
What we're asking for
We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. Our fight is with the decision-makers who approved this move without weighing what it means for families who don't have a car in the driveway. The Health Secretary must formally call in this decision before a single brick moves, and look properly at who gets left behind when the last bus goes.
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