HCRG Care Group: Performance in the South-west

Will Stone Excerpts

Wednesday 28th October 2026 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Gibson (Chippenham) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the performance of HCRG Care Group in the south-west.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I am grateful for having secured this debate about the performance of HCRG in the south-west, and Wiltshire in particular. Over recent months, a growing number of constituents, carers and healthcare professionals have contacted me. I want to open by thanking the staff who have stuck their heads above the parapet and asked their elected representatives to put HCRG’s performance on the Minister’s radar. Some of those staff are sitting in the Gallery, and I thank them for coming.

The communities served by the HCRG contract are diverse: Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire. Each has its own challenges, demographics and patterns of service use. The issue is not whether one area matters more than another; it is whether local circumstances are properly understood. District nurses covering rural Wiltshire face challenges very different from those of nurses working in more urban areas, yet many of the staff who contacted me feel that those differences have not been properly recognised.

Wiltshire is a large, rural county, where patients can live miles from healthcare facilities. Community nursing teams often spend significant amounts of the day travelling between appointments. Aggregate figures for a large contract area tell part of the story, but they can also obscure local pressures and problems. A successful service model is one that understands those differences and responds to them. I am afraid that I have concluded that HCRG does not understand those differences.

When responsibility for community health services was awarded to HCRG in October 2024, patients were promised more joined-up care, easier access to services and simpler overall experiences.

[Will Stone (Swindon North) (Lab)]

I also thank the members of staff who have taken the time to come here and put themselves forward. Does the hon. Lady agree that HCRG’s promise of improving services through a single access point has been a historic failure and that, if it does not manage to get back on track, we should look at re-evaluating its contracts?

[Sarah Gibson]

The hon. Member is absolutely right. There is serious concern about what was promised and what has been delivered. The central part of that vision and delivery was the single point of access. As he has highlighted, that is an attractive idea on paper but the reality is completely different. Constituents repeatedly tell me about the long waits on phones, missed callbacks, referrals that are difficult to track and urgent cases not reaching the right team quickly enough.