We Answered Four Times The Usual Rate. We Were Told It Wasn't A Vote.
Our consultation response rate was four times the national average for NHS reconfigurations — and our own councillors say their concerns were never properly answered either.
Imagine being told your turnout was record-breaking — and then being told the result doesn't count.
That's roughly what happened to us.
Four times the normal turnout
When the NHS asked what we thought about moving our children's A&E from Ormskirk to Southport, more than 7,840 of us responded to the 13-week consultation between July and October 2025. Local health chiefs later told Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee that this worked out at just over 3% of the local population engaging — compared with a national average of only 0.7% for NHS reconfiguration consultations. We didn't just turn up. We turned up at four times the normal rate.
Keeping the children's A&E at Ormskirk was the most popular option in that consultation. The committee approved moving it to Southport anyway, on 13 March 2026.
Told before we spoke that it was already decided
Part of why so many of us felt we had to shout louder: the NHS's own "preferred option" — Southport — was set out before residents were asked a single question. Keeping both sites, and keeping the status quo, were ruled out before the survey even began.
County Cllr Shaun Crimmins, a member of the health scrutiny committee, put it plainly: "A lot of people disengaged from consultation, because they said it was a done deal." Some of our neighbours didn't bother responding at all — not because they didn't care, but because they'd already been told their answer wouldn't change anything.
Raised by our own councillors — and still no answer
It isn't only residents who feel unheard. Lancashire County Council and Sefton Council had formed a joint scrutiny group to examine the plans before the March decision. According to the committee's deputy chair, County Cllr Hamish Mills, the concerns that group raised were "merely noted" by health chiefs, with no significant response ever received.
That pattern continued. At the end of March, the full health scrutiny committee — every party, county and district councillors together — voted unanimously to ask the Health Secretary to call in the decision. Our MP, Ashley Dalton, asked for it to be reversed too. Months on, that request still hasn't been answered.
We love the doctors and nurses at Ormskirk. Our fight isn't with them — it's with a process that asked for our views four times as loudly as usual, then moved on as if we hadn't spoken at all.
What we're asking for
We're not asking for a favour. We're asking the Health Secretary to do the one thing that's within his power right now: formally call in this decision before any building work begins, and give it the independent scrutiny our councillors — and 7,840 of us — have been asking for since March.
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