Two Health Secretaries Later, Our Call-In Letter Is Still Unanswered
177 days ago councillors from every party asked the Health Secretary to call in this decision. Two health secretaries have held the job since. Neither has replied.
It was the one thing everyone on that council could agree on.
On 31 March 2026, Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee — Labour, Conservative, Reform, independents, all of them — voted unanimously to ask the Health Secretary to call in the decision to move our children's A&E to Southport. West Lancashire MP Ashley Dalton made her own separate request for the same thing. Cross-party agreement on anything is rare. On this, there wasn't a single dissenting vote.
That was 177 days ago. Almost six months. And nobody in government has answered either letter.
The letters didn't move. The minister did — twice
Here's what's actually changed since our call-in request landed on a desk in Whitehall: the desk has had two different people sitting behind it.
Wes Streeting was Health Secretary when the letters were sent. By May 2026 he'd been replaced by James Murray, according to Digital Health News. James Murray then lasted just 67 days in the job before Prime Minister Andy Burnham appointed Yvette Cooper as Health Secretary in July 2026, as reported by Nursing Times and the Association of Optometrists' OT magazine.
Two changes of Health Secretary. Zero replies to a cross-party council and a sitting MP asking, formally, for this decision to be looked at again.
Silence isn't a neutral act
We understand ministers inherit in-trays. We understand government guidance says call-in powers aren't meant to be used "on a regular basis" — that's the line the council itself was given when it made the request. But this isn't a routine ask from a single councillor with a grievance. It's every party on a health scrutiny committee, plus the constituency's own MP, telling the government that a 13-week public consultation was run, that keeping our children's A&E at Ormskirk was the most popular option with the public, and that Southport was named as the preferred choice before a single response came in.
While the letter sits unanswered, the clock on the £33 million project keeps ticking. Nothing pauses for a reply that never comes.
We love the doctors and nurses who keep Ormskirk's children's A&E running from 8am to midnight, every day, for our kids. Our fight isn't with them. It's with a process where the people asking the right questions, through the right channels, in the right way, get silence for an answer.
What we're asking for
We're not asking for a favour. We're asking the Health Secretary to do the job the call-in process exists for: read the case, and decide — properly, and in public — whether a decision the public didn't choose should go ahead unchanged. Two ministers have now had that letter on their desk. It's time one of them opened it.
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