Six Months On, Still No Answer
It's been six months since councillors unanimously asked the Health Secretary to call in the decision to move our children's A&E — and West Lancashire is still waiting for a reply.
Count the weeks with us. It's roughly twenty-four since a cross-party group of Lancashire county councillors stood up, unanimously, and asked the Health Secretary to call in the decision to move our children's A&E eight miles away to Southport. Twenty-four weeks. Still no answer.
What actually happened, and when
On 13 March 2026, a joint committee of NHS Lancashire & South Cumbria and NHS Cheshire & Merseyside ICBs approved moving our children's A&E to Southport Hospital — a £33 million project, minimum three years, targeted for 2029. That evening, West Lancashire Borough Council issued a statement of "deep disappointment." Councillor Vickie Cummins said the council would "consider all options available to us including whether to ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to review and reverse the decision," adding: "This won't be the end of the fight."
It wasn't. In late March 2026, Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee — cross-party, no dissenters — voted unanimously to formally ask the Health Secretary to call in the decision. West Lancashire MP Ashley Dalton backed the request and asked for it to be reversed too. Committee member Councillor Shaun Crimmins put his finger on why so many of us felt cheated by the process: NHS bosses named Southport as their "preferred option" before the 13-week public consultation even began, when keeping the children's A&E at Ormskirk had already been ruled out.
That call-in request has now sat with the Department of Health and Social Care for around six months. No decision. No timeline. No public response.
Meanwhile, the system it's supposed to protect isn't coping
Silence isn't neutral — it has a cost, and the national picture explains why. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine's national performance tracker, covering July 2025 (the most recent verified month in its published data), found just 76.4% of patients were seen within four hours across all English A&E departments, falling to 63.1% in major emergency departments. 8.3% of attendances — more than 122,000 people — waited 12 hours or more. England has not met the four-hour target since June 2013, and hasn't met the 2% threshold for 12-hour waits since April 2021.
That's the system a call-in decision is meant to test before we commit £33 million and three-plus years to moving a service families told the NHS, in their thousands, they wanted kept at Ormskirk. Every month of silence is a month closer to spades in the ground at Southport, and a month further from anyone in Whitehall actually answering the question West Lancashire's own elected councillors put to them.
What we're asking for
We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. Our fight isn't with them — it's with the people who set a "preferred option" before they'd heard from us, and who have now let a unanimous, cross-party request for scrutiny gather dust for half a year.
The Health Secretary must formally call in this decision before any work begins. Six months of silence is not a decision. It's a way of avoiding one.
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