Communities Like Ours Have Won This Fight Before
Royal Glamorgan and Charing Cross both faced the same playbook we're facing now — and both won. Here's how.
It's tempting to think a decision like this, once made, is final. It isn't. Across the UK, communities that refused to accept an A&E downgrade have made health boards and government ministers reverse course. We are not the first parents to fight this, and we don't have to be the first to win.
Royal Glamorgan: 24,000 signatures, a unanimous U-turn
At Royal Glamorgan Hospital near Llantrisant in south Wales, health chiefs proposed downgrading the 24-hour A&E to a day-only or minor-injuries service — almost exactly the kind of "reconfiguration" logic being used against Ormskirk. Local people didn't accept the paperwork as final. More than 24,000 people signed a petition to save the department, and close to 1,000 hospital staff added their names through Unite the union. In June 2020, Cwm Taf Morgannwg Health Board members voted unanimously to drop the downgrade entirely and keep the A&E open round the clock. One campaigner called it "people power victorious" — because that's what it was.
Charing Cross: seven years, then a reversal from the top
In west London, Charing Cross Hospital faced a plan to strip out its A&E and hundreds of beds and sell off 87% of the site. Campaigners — residents, unions, local councils and an MP — fought it for seven years. In March 2019, Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced the entire "Shaping a Healthier Future" scheme was being halted. The government had, in the end, withdrawn its support for a plan it once defended as necessary.
What both cases have in common
Neither of these campaigns won by being polite and waiting. They won by staying loud, staying organised, and refusing to let officials treat a paper consultation as the end of the conversation. Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee already voted unanimously, cross-party, to ask the Health Secretary to call in our decision. Our MP has asked for it to be reversed. That request is sitting unanswered right now — exactly the stage at which Charing Cross and Royal Glamorgan needed the public to get louder, not quieter.
We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. Our fight isn't with them — it's with the people who launched a 13-week consultation, watched the public choose to keep the children's A&E at Ormskirk, and pressed ahead with Southport anyway.
What we're asking for
The Health Secretary must formally call in this decision before a single brick moves on the £33 million Southport plan. It has worked for other communities facing the same fight. It can work for ours.
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