An open letter to Andy Burnham

Dear Mr Burnham,

You have built a career on a single, powerful idea: that the North of England is tired of being told what's good for it by people in Whitehall who never have to live with the consequences. You have said it in speeches, in interviews, on stages up and down the country. The North gets ignored.

We agree with you. And now we're asking you to prove you meant it.

Eight miles from your own Makerfield constituency, the NHS has decided to move the children's A&E out of Ormskirk Hospital and across to Southport. It will cost £33 million and take at least three years. And here is the part that should trouble a man who says he believes in listening:

they asked us first, and we told them no.

More than 7,840 people responded to the consultation. Keeping the children's A&E at Ormskirk was the most popular option. The people of West Lancashire could not have been clearer. The NHS had already named Southport as its "preferred option" before the consultation even opened — and when the results came in against them, they went ahead anyway.

This is the exact thing you have spent years warning about. A decision taken over the heads of the people it affects. A consultation that felt like a formality. A community that did everything right — engaged, responded, organised — and was ignored.

In March, Lancashire County Council's health scrutiny committee voted unanimously — every party, no exceptions — to ask the Health Secretary to call the decision in. Our MP asked for it to be reversed. And then Westminster went quiet. The Health Secretary resigned. The request has been sitting unanswered ever since, lost in a leadership crisis that has nothing to do with the families of West Lancashire.

You may soon be Prime Minister. If you are, you will appoint the Health Secretary who holds the power to put this right. This is not an attack. It is an invitation — the first, cleanest chance you will have to show that "the North matters" is more than a slogan.

So we are asking you plainly: instruct your Health Secretary to call in the Shaping Care Together decision. In your first week. Before a single brick is moved.

Prove the North matters. Start eight miles from home.

Signed by the residents of West Lancashire

This is a respectful, open challenge from a community campaign. We are not affiliated with any political party.