St Helier maternity and women's healthcare services

St Helier hospital has been in the news again recently after reports that Women’s Health Services at St Helier may be relocated due to safety concerns.

Cllr Richard Poole representing Cannon Hill ward made the following speech at full Council proposing a Lib Dem amendment to the administration's motion on the issue.

"The situation at St Helier hospital is serious. Everyone knows it’s serious and yet today we have before us a motion that is both flawed and deeply political. It neither attempts to address the fundamental issue of safe, high quality healthcare provision for local women nor does it address how we get to the point as local politicians we all want to get to, namely better health outcomes for the women of Merton.

People across Merton don’t want politicians taking liberties with issues like this. They expect us to focus on what matters: helping them live healthier lives for longer, and ensuring safe, high‑quality healthcare when they need it.

Madam Mayor, the administration could have sought to formulate a cross-party motion on this issue, or at least one that attempted to win support from across the chamber. 

Instead, the motion this evening, unamended is a do-nothing political motion. It doesn’t seek to act, change anything or seek to hold anyone to account. 

It exists simply to push the MP for Mitcham and Morden’s narrative — a narrative more interested in picking political fights and criticising NHS leaders who are doing their best with a failing estate this Labour government won’t properly address until the mid‑2030s, rather than dealing with the real issues and risks.

The Conservative group’s amendment overlooks their own role in the long delays to deal with the estate issues at St Helier. After years of stalled progress in the national hospital programme, they maybe should be more cautious about turning this into a political argument rather than focusing on the real risks to women’s health services. Nonetheless their criticism of the current government’s decision to delay the much needed investment in St Helier are well founded.

But our amendment gets to the heart of the issue. It seeks to put patient safety first. If a decant of services is required as reading the papers to the Trust’s board of last week it indeed and concerningly seems likely, it is essential that there is both capacity at receiving Trusts but also and crucially a plan to return services back to St Helier at the earliest opportunity.

Furthermore, it seeks to hold the GESH board to account, ensuring that any failure to produce a plan or backsliding on a commitment to bring women’s services back to St Helier would trigger a substantial service variation requiring formal public consultation and referral to the relevant local health scrutiny committees.

Of course, no one wants vital maternity and women’s healthcare moved even temporarily but surely members can see the only alternative would be to treat women in an unsafe environment. No one here wants that, I’m sure.

So, I ask members to back our amendment and add some teeth to this motion."