Star comment: Stepping in by Hunt a failure

This is the strange world created by Shropshire’s Future Fit process and the general delay, indecision, and fighting of corners created by the need to shape the county’s health services for the future.

Telford & Wrekin Council is to consider a motion calling for Jeremy Hunt to intervene over the proposed overnight closure of the accident and emergency department at Telford’s Princess Royal Hospital. The measure put forward from the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals NHS Trust is due to a shortage of consultants.

The motion going before the council declares it “no longer has confidence” in the management board of the hospitals trust. It is an understandable response. But in calling for Mr Hunt to intervene, the council should be careful what it wishes for.

For a start, it paves the way for an imposed decision from outside, rather than a decision made locally through the processes of local democracy – and isn’t the importance of local democracy something councillors regularly make a big deal about?

And the assumption seems to be that if and when Mr Hunt did intervene, he would look at the plans, disagree with them, and throw them out.

Mr Hunt has already indicated that he wants Shropshire to sort out its health issues locally. So if he is frogmarched to the scene of this particular battle and asked to make a ruling, it is possible he will dismiss the council’s protestations as political campaigning and parochialism.

In any event, Shrewsbury MP Daniel Kawczynski will no doubt be keen to put an alternative viewpoint to Mr Hunt when it comes to Shropshire’s continuing health conundrum.

The recommendation on the table is for Telford’s A&E to be downgraded, becoming an urgent care centre, with the county’s full accident and emergency department being based at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, which will also be home to an urgent care centre.

We are still awaiting the outcome of an independent review into Future Fit and know that consultation is unlikely to start until September.

Continual delay just stretches out the damaging atmosphere of uncertainty.

The danger is that this time next year the arguments will be continuing, the decisions remain delayed, and the situation in the hospitals is getting increasingly difficult.

Mr Hunt could indeed step in and be prepared to be Mr Unpopular, making a decision which outrages one or the other part of the county, or conceivably both. But what a failure of local democracy it would be if it came to that.