Six Months. Still No Answer From Westminster.
Every party on the council's health committee agreed to ask the Health Secretary to step in. Nearly six months on, he still hasn't replied.
Six months ago, county councillors from every party sat in the same room and agreed on one thing: the decision to move our children's A&E to Southport needed stopping. They asked the Health Secretary to call it in. They are still waiting for an answer.
A vote nobody disagreed with
On 13 March 2026, a joint committee of two NHS boards signed off the plan to move Ormskirk's children's A&E eight miles to Southport — a £33 million project, a minimum three-year build, targeted for 2029. Late that same month, Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee voted, unanimously and across party lines, to ask the Health Secretary to call the decision in. West Lancashire MP Ashley Dalton made the same request. Wes Streeting has yet to say yes or no.
What the vote sounded like
The committee's own words, reported by the Lancashire Post on 31 March 2026, are worth repeating. Councillor Shaun Crimmins on the consultation that preceded the decision: "A lot of people disengaged from the consultation, because they said it was a done deal." Councillor Gaynor Hargreaves on why distance matters for a child in an emergency: "Those few minutes could make a difference to life and death." Councillor Martin Gawith put it plainly: "Having somewhere at the end of the road might be very nice to get to, but if we haven't got the skills in there, there's no point in having it."
Those aren't campaign lines. That's what elected councillors — from every party on the committee — said out loud, on the record, before voting together to ask for this to be stopped.
No deadline, no reply
There is no legal clock forcing a call-in decision, and nobody outside Whitehall knows if one is even being considered. What we do know: it has now been more than 189 days since the joint committee's decision, and close to six months since councillors of every stripe asked for it to be reversed — and the file, as far as we can tell, hasn't moved. Meanwhile the clock on the other side keeps ticking: a three-year build, a 2029 target, and every month that passes without a call-in is a month closer to spades in the ground.
We love the doctors and nurses who keep Ormskirk's children's A&E running today. Our fight isn't with them — it's with a process that asked 7,840 of us for our views, approved the option most of us rejected, and now won't even say yes or no to a cross-party request to think again.
What we're asking for: Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting must formally call in this decision before a single spade goes in the ground — and he owes Lancashire's councillors, and our kids, an answer.
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