NHS health chiefs have voted unanimously to bring children’s emergency services back to Southport Hospital, potentially ending a 23-year campaign to reverse one of the most controversial decisions in the Southport’s history.
The joint committee of NHS Cheshire and Merseyside and NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria approved the Southport option at a fractious public meeting at Ormskirk Civic Hall today (13 March 2026), confirming plans to reunite adult and children’s Accident and Emergency services on a single hospital site for the first time since June 2003.
The meeting was briefly adjourned after members of the public disrupted proceedings. When Rob Cooper, chief executive of Mersey and West Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, confirmed the “recommended way forward” was Southport, shouts erupted from the gallery. “You’ve already made it,” one member of the public called out. Chair Prof Hilary Garratt CBE warned that further disruptions would see the remainder of the meeting conducted in private, telling the room it was “a meeting held in public, not a public meeting.”
When the committee reconvened, the vote to approve the Decision Making Business Case was unanimous.
West Lancashire MP Ashley Dalton, who was present in the room, said immediately after the vote that she intended to appeal the decision to the Secretary of State for Health, the most direct route to challenge the outcome.
The decision triggers a programme expected to take three to five years to deliver a new children’s A&E and inpatient facility at Southport Hospital, at a cost of £33m. The build will include a dedicated children’s ambulance entrance and up to 354 new parking spaces.
Children’s A&E, the children’s ward and maternity services were stripped from Southport and relocated to Ormskirk Hospital in 2003 in a move that prompted 4,000 people to march through the streets in protest and generated a petition of more than 18,500 signatures that was delivered to Downing Street.
Southport and Ormskirk have since operated as the only district general hospitals in England running adult and children’s emergency departments on two separate sites nine miles apart.
Children’s A&E at Ormskirk has been closed overnight since April 2020. The NHS has openly stated it does not have the workforce for 24-hour cover at two locations.
Under the approved plan, Ormskirk Hospital will retain an Urgent Treatment Centre, which is expected to see a 15.5% rise in attendance, equivalent to about 13 to 14 additional patients per day. The Skelmersdale Walk-in Centre is projected to see six additional patients per day. The Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee had recommended upgrading the Skelmersdale facility to a full Urgent Treatment Centre if the Southport option was approved, but that commitment does not appear in the business case.
The Southport option was preferred on every practical measure. At £33m, it costs less than a third of the Ormskirk alternative, which was costed at £91.3m. It requires five years to deliver against seven for Ormskirk, needs 1,800 square metres of new space against 8,800, and involves relocating one service rather than seven, with a further ten potentially affected.
More than 7,840 people engaged with the Shaping Care Together consultation between July and October 2025, including 5,009 completed surveys. Responses split sharply along geographic lines, with each area backing its nearest hospital. Independent polling by Survation found 33% of residents favoured Southport, 29% favoured Ormskirk, 32% favoured neither and 6% did not know.
An independent consultation report by the Centre for Health Communication Research found that the Ormskirk option was viewed more positively by the overall survey population, but noted that Southport residents were underrepresented and Skelmersdale and Ormskirk residents overrepresented due to locally organised campaigns. The report stressed the consultation was “not a referendum.” The programme itself repeated the phrase “consultations are not referendums or votes” four times in its formal response to scrutiny committee concerns.
The decision will be felt most keenly in Ormskirk and Skelmersdale, where residents have opposed the loss of their children’s emergency department. A petition organised by Our West Lancashire gathered 2,622 signatures against the closure of children’s A&E at Ormskirk. Skelmersdale, which has no train station, low car ownership and high deprivation, faces the longest additional travel times under the Southport option.
The mitigation package for West Lancashire includes a £4.4m healthcare centre in Digmoor, Skelmersdale, a wider £20m investment across the area, and £178k in targeted GP funding. A Travel Advisory Group has been established, but shuttle buses between the two hospital sites remain at the “will be considered” stage.
The decision does not address maternity services, which were excluded from the consultation despite being moved from Ormskirk to Whiston in September 2025. The NHS has confirmed maternity is the next phase of the Shaping Care Together programme, acknowledging “clear interconnectivity” between maternity and children’s emergency care.
The vote closes a chapter that began in 2003 when the original Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust relocated children’s services to Ormskirk in what former Southport MP Dr John Pugh has described as “a political stitch-up.” That trust no longer exists, having merged into Mersey and West Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
Southport MP Patrick Hurley, who gathered 327 petition signatures supporting the Southport option, and Councillor Mike Prendergast, who organised a cross-party petition backed by all groups on Sefton Council with 286 signatures, both campaigned publicly for the return of services.
Revenue savings of £1.5m per year are anticipated from consolidating emergency services onto a single site.
Whether the decision stands may now depend on Ms Dalton’s appeal. If the Secretary of State accepts the referral, it would trigger a review by the Independent Reconfiguration Panel before any implementation work can begin. A judicial review, brought on grounds that the consultation process was flawed or that equality duties were not met, remains a further possibility.