Documenting the campaigns to keep open Grisedale Croft and to secure the future of community healthcare on Alston Moor.
Alston Moor is one of the most isolated rural communities in mainland England. The Alston Moor Parish Council is documenting and pursuing two parallel campaigns — to keep Grisedale Croft open, and to restore community healthcare to the Ruth Lancaster James site.
Each has its own story, its own working group, and its own folder in the Vault. Both rest on commitments that have already been made.
Grisedale Croft is the only residential care home on Alston Moor and the residential half of the 2018 NHS-and-Council settlement that followed the loss of in-patient beds at the Ruth Lancaster James Cottage Hospital. The Parish Council, working with this community, intends to hold them to it.
The cottage hospital served Alston Moor for over a century. Its in-patient beds were closed in 2018 on the basis of commitments that have only ever been half kept. This campaign asks the ICB to recognise the integrated model the community designed in 2014 — and which the country now calls a Neighbourhood Health Centre.
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Cabinet is listed to decide the future of Grisedale Croft Care Home on Tuesday 13 October. The scrutiny committee has made its recommendations, some of what it heard does not match the written record, and the NHS is now taking part. Here is where things stand.
Read more →Westmorland and Furness Council’s Health and Adults Scrutiny Committee meets on Wednesday 23 September 2026 to consider the Grisedale Croft consultation report. Alston Moor Parish Council has put a written submission before it, drawn entirely from the authority’s own documents. All three papers are published here.
Read more →The future of Grisedale Croft matters to every household on Alston Moor, and this is the moment to show it.
Read more →Alston Moor folk have seen many promises broken before. Consultation results not being paid attention to by the very authorities who have asked our opinion. Our scepticism is earned. However, across Britain, communities have faced the same threats — and some have succeeded. Their experience informs how these campaigns work.
From legal letters to packed public meetings, families and communities across Britain have reversed care home closure decisions. Here is what worked.
Read the cases →Rural towns facing “temporary” closures, vacancy excuses, and closed-door decisions. Some refused to accept it. Here is how they did it.
Read the cases →The Vault is the working group's shared archive. The items below are flagged public so anyone can read them.
Alston Moor Parish Council’s written submission to Westmorland and Furness Council’s Health and Adults Scrutiny Committee, submitted on 18 September 2026 for the meeting of Wednesday 23 September 2026 (agenda item 6). It sets out, from the authority’s own published documents, why the consultation on the future of Grisedale Croft Care Home is not considered to have met the standards the law requires, and why the consultation report now before the Committee is not an accurate or complete record. Eighteen pages, with a full list of sources.
A single page prepared for members of the Health and Adults Scrutiny Committee ahead of the meeting of 23 September 2026. It lists 16 findings drawn from Westmorland and Furness Council’s own documents, compares how the Grisedale Croft Care Home and Applethwaite Green Care Home consultations were run and reported, and sets out what the Parish Council asks the Committee to do. A readable web version is also available.
The questions Alston Moor Parish Council asks the Health and Adults Scrutiny Committee to put to officers, prepared at an officer’s request to accompany the written submission. Each question arises from a document Westmorland and Furness Council has itself published, and each is referenced to its source and to the paragraph of the written submission where the point is set out in full.
The leaflet delivered to homes across Alston Moor by the Grisedale Croft Working Group. It summarises what the consultation asks and what the Working Group found in the documents behind it, to help residents answer the questions and respond before the consultation closes on 19 August 2026.
Working group members can upload, tag, and organise the full archive.
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