Healthcare in Rural Areas

Richard Foord Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Dr Huq. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson) for securing this debate and for talking about the one-size-fits-all solution, which I completely recognise. He is right to say that neighbourhood health hubs need to apply to proper neighbourhoods—things that we would identify with. In rural areas we would identify with towns of 10,000, not 50,000.

There are unique challenges associated with rural healthcare, and all too often it feels like those challenges are invisible from Westminster and Whitehall. Rural and coastal areas are not the same as urban areas. Last month, the Government said that tackling the gap between urban and rural healthcare would be a core focus of their 10-year health plan. That was very welcome, but after years of neglect by the Conservatives, it feels like rural communities, including those in Devon, are increasingly cut off from GPs, ambulances and cancer treatment, and the decline continues.

The south-west already has the fewest GP practices of any region. It also experienced the largest percentage fall in the number of GP practices—2% of practices in the south-west closed between 2024 and 2025. The data for rural healthcare compares poorly with urban areas. Liberal Democrat research found that waiting times for life-threatening ambulance calls are 45% longer in rural areas. Waits of four weeks or more for cancer diagnoses are three times longer in rural areas.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ely and East Cambridgeshire (Charlotte Cane) talked about accessibility in rural areas, and she is quite right to do so. Just getting to the GP takes longer—a third longer by car and twice as long by public transport. That disparity is set to rise if we continue to see bus routes curtailed and rail infrastructure left to crumble.

Honiton and Sidmouth, which I represent, sits in the bottom quarter of constituencies in the country for access to healthcare by public transport, walking or cycling. For those outside the main towns, the situation is worse. The village of Stockland, for example, is in the bottom 0.2% nationally for transport access to healthcare. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) talked about accessibility issues in transport. He is quite right, but that is only part of the challenge.

Rural areas also have older populations, which places a greater strain on already stretched services. My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour) was spot on about how older populations place so much greater a strain on health services in rural areas. Poor digital connectivity means that the shift to online healthcare and digital access often excludes older residents, many of whom have no desire to acquaint themselves with digital devices. They also suffer from isolation and loneliness, shaped by distance and limited local services.

One example that I think illustrates this issue well is dementia in rural areas. In Honiton and Sidmouth 1.6% of patients have been diagnosed with dementia, whereas the national average is just half that—0.8% across England as a whole. My constituent Heather Penwarden is the chair of Dementia Friendly Honiton. She says that dementia care in Devon

“seems at an all-time low”.

She should know that, because she has been volunteering in this space for 16 years. One carer, through tears, asked Heather:

“How bad does it have to be before I get some genuinely helpful and sustained support in looking after my dear husband through his dementia?”

Heather’s group initially worked alongside community psychiatric nurses from the Devon partnership NHS trust. Dementia Friendly Honiton raised an incredible £350,000 to pay for an Admiral nurse through an embedded scheme. That nurse attended memory cafés, gave regular advice and prevented crises for those with complex cases, but due to a freeze on NHS recruitment and an apparently “outdated” model of fundraising and hosting, there is little chance of the role being filled again by the Royal Devon University hospital.

The Liberal Democrats are calling for a rescue plan: recruiting more GPs and social care workers to provide proactive community support and ease pressure on ambulances, acute hospitals and A&E; creating a national care agency to provide consistent funding for free personal care; and creating a small surgeries fund to protect rural and remote services from underfunding. If we are serious about closing the disparity between urban and rural, we must recognise that rural communities have different health needs.