The £58 Million Question: Was This Really About Cost?
NHS papers put the cost of moving our children's A&E to Southport at £33.1m against £91.3m for the option residents actually wanted — but the same papers never cost that option as its own bid.
Ask anyone why our children's A&E is moving to Southport, and you'll get the same answer: money. Southport was cheaper. Case closed.
It isn't that simple — and the NHS's own paperwork says so.
The number behind the headline
NHS estimates put moving the children's A&E to Southport at £33.1 million. The alternative costed alongside it — moving adult A&E to Ormskirk, so both departments sat together there — came in at £91.3 million. That's a £58 million gap, and it's the figure decision-makers reach for whenever they're asked to justify Southport.
What the same paperwork doesn't say
Look past the headline number and it gets more complicated. Moving services to Southport meant shifting one co-dependent department — the paediatric inpatient unit. Doing it the other way round, with adult A&E moving to Ormskirk, meant untangling and relocating seven services that all depend on each other to run safely. Cost and complexity point the same way on paper.
What that comparison doesn't do is answer the question residents actually asked. Keeping both children's and adult A&E at Ormskirk — the option that came out on top in a 13-week public consultation — was never put forward and costed as a standalone bid. It only ever appears in the paperwork as a side-effect of moving adult services the other direction. We were offered a choice between two ways of moving departments around. We were never shown a proper price for the one thing most of us actually asked for.
Precision matters here
Ormskirk Hospital is not closing. It will carry on handling the vast majority of what it always has. The change is specific: when a child in West Lancashire needs emergency care, the nearest children's A&E will be 8 miles further away, in Southport, from 2029. Nobody disputes that reconfiguring services costs money to get right. What we're asking is why the option that won the consultation was never given the same fair costing as the two the NHS chose between.
We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. Our fight is with a process that priced two versions of moving services around, and called that a full answer to what 7,840 of us actually asked for.
What we're asking for
We're asking the Health Secretary to do the one thing within his power right now: formally call in this decision before any building work begins — and to ask, as part of that scrutiny, why the option residents actually chose was never costed and considered on its own terms.
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