Hospitals

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

In rural communities like mine, our issues are very often about the distances that we have to travel in order to get any kind of healthcare, but particularly to reach hospitals. In Morecambe bay, which covers three quarters of my constituency population-wise, we are funded as if we have one hospital, but have to have three. One way that we have got around that is to have funding for GP surgeries to provide minor injury care in places like Grange, Ambleside, Hawkshead and beyond—yet, as of 1 April, our local integrated care board has cancelled that funding. There was a total of 1,221 minor injury assessments last year; they are now pushed on to the urgent treatment centre at Kendal, potentially overloading that excellent centre, but also causing huge harm to people who live in those rural and dispersed places, and undermining the funding model for those GP surgeries and putting them at risk. I would love it if the Minister had words with the ICB to challenge it on this.

Tomorrow, the ICB for Lancashire and South Cumbria will meet. On its agenda may or may not be, but jolly well should be, the decision to approve and to seek a new provider of GP services in the community of Coniston. We have known for three months that the excellent Dr Frey and Dr Abbas were retiring and leaving their posts in July, and the ICB has dragged its feet for three months, despite the community clamouring for action. We presented a petition of over 1,000 signatures in this place just a few weeks ago for there to be a replacement of the GP surgery to serve the community in Coniston.

When it comes to the new hospital programme, I acknowledge the fantasy figures behind the previous Government’s non-existent programme, but I point out that land is available in the larger district general hospital site serving Lancaster in the southern part of my constituency. It is right next to the new medical school at Lancaster University and it is absolutely shovel-ready. There is no logical reason for it to be in the last division of the third phase of the programme, which means that it will not be built until the 2030s. I urge the Minister to think again on that point.

The Minister will be unsurprised to hear me use my last minute and a bit to talk about radiotherapy. In the northern part of my constituency, in places like Appleby, people who have cancer are able to get good quality radiotherapy treatment at Carlisle, but in the southern three quarters of my constituency, people have to make return journeys, sometimes of four hours a day for weeks on end, to get radiotherapy treatment at our nearest centre in Preston. That is outrageous. That is why we are asking for there to be a satellite radiotherapy unit at the Westmorland general hospital in Kendal. This is not just about convenience. According to an OECD recommendation, radiotherapy should be the primary treatment for cancer in 53% of cases; shamefully, in the UK, it is in only 36% of cases. Lancashire and South Cumbria ranks 42nd of 42 ICBs, with only 29% of people with cancer receiving radiotherapy. That is in no small part down to the failure to provide that treatment within our communities.

It is absolutely the case that the longer the journeys to treatment, the shorter the life expectancy of the people suffering with cancer. I urge the Minister finally to make the decision, which we have been demanding for years, to add to the chemotherapy service, to the diagnostics and to the cancer surgery that we now have at Kendal. It was wonderful to win those campaigns, but the one thing that we are missing is radiotherapy. It is time that we brought it to the people of Westmorland, so that they can have shorter journeys and longer lives.