Nearly Six Months. Still No Answer.
It's been almost six months since councillors of every party asked the Health Secretary to step in. Whitehall still hasn't even said whether it's listening.
On 30 March 2026, every councillor on Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee — whatever party they sit for — agreed on one thing: this decision needs a second look. They voted unanimously to ask Health Secretary Wes Streeting to call in the plan to move our children's A&E to Southport [Lancashire Evening Post, 31 March 2026]. West Lancashire MP Ashley Dalton said the same week she'd make her own call-in bid.
That was nearly six months ago. We still don't know if anyone in Whitehall is even reading the file.
What was actually asked for
This wasn't a protest letter. It was the local authority whose statutory job is to scrutinise NHS decisions, voting formally and without a single dissent, that the choice of Southport over Ormskirk deserved review before £33 million and three years of building work go into it. The ask was simple: pause, look again, and take seriously that 7,840 people responded to the public consultation and keeping the children's A&E at Ormskirk was the most popular option — even though NHS bosses had already named Southport as their "preferred option" before a single response was counted.
The clock that hasn't started because the answer hasn't come
Under the Health and Care Act 2022, once the Health Secretary formally accepts a call-in, he has six months to decide. That deadline is meant to stop these things drifting. But it only starts ticking the moment he says yes. Almost six months after the request landed on his desk, we don't have confirmation he's accepted it, rejected it, or is still deciding whether to decide. Nobody outside Whitehall knows where this sits.
Why every week of silence has a cost
While the paperwork sits somewhere, nothing changes on the ground: children in Ormskirk, Skelmersdale, Burscough, Tarleton and Halsall are still 10–20 minutes further from Southport than from Ormskirk to reach the specialist centres at Alder Hey, Whiston and Aintree if things go wrong there too. In West Lancashire alone there are an estimated 18,178 children aged 0–14 [Lancashire County Council, West Lancashire Children and Young People Profile, October 2024, citing NOMIS mid-2023 population estimates] — every one of them currently covered by an A&E that opened for their district specifically because 8am–midnight, close to home, was judged to be what young families needed. That judgement doesn't stop being true because a decision letter is sitting unread.
We love the doctors and nurses who keep that department running under pressure. Our fight isn't with them. It's with a process that asked 7,840 of us for our views, then moved ahead regardless — and a government that has now let a unanimous, cross-party request for oversight sit for the best part of half a year without so much as an acknowledgement.
What we're asking for
Health Secretary Wes Streeting must say, in public, whether he has accepted the call-in — and if he has, start the clock. Silence is not a decision. It's a way of avoiding one, while the building work edges closer to 2029.
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