Having read the consultation document, the Working Group has concluded that this consultation does not meet the standard required by the Gunning Principles. We set out our analysis below.

The consultation document states that Grisedale Croft's total operating cost in 2025/26 is approximately £4,072 per resident per week, based on an annual budget of £755,000 and a December 2025 occupancy of five residents (including two short-term residents). This figure is presented as evidence of unsustainability.

The Working Group asks the Council to consider what this figure actually demonstrates. The £4,072 figure is not evidence that Grisedale Croft is inherently expensive to run. It is evidence that it is operating at a fraction of its registered capacity. The cost crisis is a function of suppressed occupancy, and the suppression of that occupancy is itself the subject of our challenge.

There is a further dimension that the consultation document does not address. Westmorland and Furness Council is the registered provider of Grisedale Croft under the Health and Social Care Act 2008. As the registered provider, the Council is legally responsible under Regulation 15 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 for ensuring that the premises are suitable for the regulated activity. The building's current condition is not an external fact. It is the direct consequence of Cumbria County Council's failure to honour its 2008 commitment to replace the building, ratified by Westmorland and Furness Council's own failure to invest since April 2023. The Council cannot simultaneously be the registered provider whose deferred maintenance has contributed to the building's state, and the authority presenting that condition as the evidential basis for closure, without explaining why it did not act as provider in the intervening years.

The consultation document proceeds as if no specific commitment was made to Alston Moor in 2017–18. One was. Ms Phipps confirmed at the meeting that she searched the Council's cabinet papers and found nothing from a county council perspective, while acknowledging that the record from a health perspective is more substantial. That asymmetry is significant. The community gave up its hospital in-patient beds on the strength of a commitment documented extensively on the NHS side but absent from the Council's records.

• a
  The Alston Alliance Plan (Draft Summary, 2017–18). Developed jointly by the League of Friends, Alston Moor Parish Council, Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, Cumbria County Council Adult Social Care and Public Health, and Alston Medical Practice — and signed by Parish Council representatives — this document sets out the formal bargain: residential step-down beds at Grisedale Croft would form part of the integrated care replacement package for the lost in-patient beds.
• b
  Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, March 2018. CPFT's published commitment on permanent closure of the Ruth Lancaster James in-patient beds was that alternatives would include "using residential beds as intermediate beds for health purposes." On Alston Moor, only Grisedale Croft can answer that description.
• c
  Care Quality Commission inspection report, 10 October 2018. The regulator's own inspection record states that the registered manager confirmed Grisedale Croft would provide health beds as part of the Alston Plan. This is contemporaneous, independent corroboration in the regulator's own words.
• d
  North Cumbria Clinical Commissioning Group, January 2019. The CCG's published assessment was that the most progress of all Success Regime localities had been made in Alston — consistent with the step-down arrangement being operational at that time.
• e
  Cumbria County Council Health Scrutiny Committee, December 2020. The Committee formally recorded its disappointment at the lack of progress on the 2017–18 commitments. Those commitments were real enough to be the subject of formal scrutiny by a statutory body.
• f
  The 2017 legal challenge. The challenge brought by the League of Friends and the Parish Council, conducted through public-law solicitors Leigh Day and supported by a CrowdJustice campaign, was resolved before reaching court on the basis of NHS and council commitments about alternative provision. Those commitments became the Alston Alliance Plan. We address the significance of this further in section 8.
• g
  WFC Annual Plan 2026/27, finalised 10–13 April 2026. Finalised approximately nine days before the Cabinet decision of 21 April, the Plan commits to supporting people "in the place they call home," identifies intermediate care and remaining connected to communities as priorities, and acknowledges that Government funding changes have removed rurality adjustments that previously recognised the additional cost of serving communities such as Alston Moor.

We are also able to confirm that we have spoken with people who have direct operational knowledge of how the intermediate-care beds at Grisedale Croft were used. They confirm the arrangement was active, criteria-documented, and subject to formal admission processes. The financial records of that arrangement — payments by NHS bodies for occupied health-bed nights — will exist in the Council's own accounts and in the records of the commissioning body, and form part of the Freedom of Information response due from the Council on 22 May 2026.

The Working Group has submitted twenty-one Freedom of Information requests across nine public bodies. The full register is published at alstonmoorhealth.org/foi-register.

The consultation document does not address the employment impact of closing Grisedale Croft. This is a significant omission.

Grisedale Croft provides direct employment to care staff, domestic staff, kitchen staff, and support workers. These are not peripheral jobs in a community of 2,000 people where employment opportunities are already severely limited. They are anchor jobs — roles that keep local people in the community, support local households, and generate economic activity in the local economy. Many of these workers have accumulated years of specialist experience caring for Alston Moor's elderly residents. That experience cannot simply be transferred to a four-bed replacement wherever it might eventually be built, and it cannot be replaced at all if the workers find employment elsewhere in the meantime.

The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 requires public authorities to consider how their commissioning activities can improve the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of their area. The Local Government Act 1999 requires best value authorities to secure continuous improvement "having regard to a combination of economy, efficiency and effectiveness," and statutory guidance from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government makes clear that overall value — including social and economic value — must be considered. A true assessment of the economic impact of closing Grisedale Croft must include the loss of anchor employment in a community that, as the Council's own Annual Plan acknowledges, is already under-resourced and has already lost the rurality and remoteness adjustments that previously recognised the additional cost of providing services here. No such assessment appears in the consultation materials. We ask the Council to confirm whether an employment impact assessment has been carried out, and if so to publish it.

The Working Group is gathering evidence from families on Alston Moor who have been unable to obtain a placement at Grisedale Croft for a relative, or whose relative was discharged to a facility far from home. That evidence, gathered via a formal community evidence form, will be submitted as part of the Parish Council's consultation response.

We are already aware that at least one family has written directly to Councillor Bell, describing the personal impact of being unable to obtain a placement at Grisedale Croft for two close family members. The distress caused to those families — the journeys, the impossibility of regular visits, the sense that their loved ones had been displaced from the community that was their home — is the human reality behind the occupancy statistics. The people not in Grisedale Croft are not absent because the need was not there. They are absent because there is currently no functioning referral pathway to Grisedale Croft at all — a fact now confirmed in writing by the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and consistent with the ICB's confirmation that it holds no commissioning records for the step-down beds.

We are aware — without identifying details — of a person currently being asked to consider a placement outside Alston who has lived in Alston for over forty years. Their social network, the people who form the texture of their daily life, is in Alston.

There is a case that a newer facility elsewhere would provide a better physical environment. We do not dismiss those material considerations. But the choice for a frail elderly person with forty years of roots in Alston is not between a better room far away and a worse room nearby. It is between a room where friends and family can walk through the door on an ordinary afternoon, and a room where those same people face a two-hour round trip over roads that close in winter, with no public transport to fall back on. The sole bus service into Alston currently runs on Saturdays only and is itself on a temporary basis. Proximity to the people you love is not a secondary consideration. For most people at the end of their lives, it is the primary one.

Displacement of an elderly person from a community this isolated is not a neutral administrative act. The damage it does — to daily family contact, to end-of-life care, to the settled contentment that also reduces the burden on care workers — is real, foreseeable, and preventable. It bears directly on the Council's duty under section 1 of the Care Act to promote individual wellbeing, on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and on the Council's own Annual Plan commitment to support people "in the place they call home."

The Working Group wishes to be direct about the legal position, because it is better stated clearly than implied.

The doctrine of substantive legitimate expectation in English public law protects communities from public authorities that break clear, unambiguous promises on which those communities have relied to their detriment. The leading case is R v North and East Devon Health Authority, ex parte Coughlan [2001] QB 213, in which the Court of Appeal held that the Health Authority's closure of a facility — citing running costs — was unlawful because it broke a specific promise that the facility would be the residents' home. Lord Woolf MR said the failure to keep the promise was "equivalent to a breach of contract in private law." The Court found the breach of the legitimate expectation was "so unfair that it amounted to an abuse of power." The justification offered by the Health Authority — financial cost — was held insufficient. There was no overriding public interest that warranted departing from the promise.

The test, as elaborated by Laws LJ in R (Nadarajah) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2005] EWCA Civ 1363, is that a public authority may only depart from a promise if it is "a proportionate response … having regard to a legitimate aim pursued by the public body in the public interest." The Working Group invites the Council to identify, in writing, what legitimate aim of sufficient weight justifies a proportionate departure from the specific, documented, multi-party commitment made to Alston Moor in 2017–18. The financial case collapses when occupancy is assessed at registered capacity. No other justification has been advanced.

The NHS Constitution reinforces this analysis. All NHS bodies — including the ICB and NCIC as successors to the 2018 commitments — are required by law to take account of the Constitution in their decisions and actions. The Constitution gives patients the right to expect their NHS to assess community health needs and commission services to meet them, and requires services to be coordinated around the needs and preferences of individual patients. A decision to proceed without honouring the 2017–18 commitments is not only inconsistent with the doctrine of substantive legitimate expectation — it is inconsistent with obligations the NHS carries independently of that doctrine, and which it cannot discharge by pointing to its own failure to commission the services it promised.

The parallel with Coughlan is not superficial. In that case: the promise was specific; it was made to a small group of people; it was given in exchange for something they gave up; it was expressly reaffirmed; and there was no alternative accommodation offered. In the case of Alston Moor: the promise was specific and documented; it was made to a defined community; the community gave up its hospital in-patient beds on the strength of it; it was reaffirmed by the CCG in January 2019; and the step-down beds were formally recorded in the CQC inspection report. The differences between Coughlan and this situation favour the Alston Moor community, not the Council.

What we were promised in 2017–18 — and what was delivered

Each element of the 2017–18 settlement and what the community of Alston Moor has actually received.

The Working Group asks for six things, each of which we would like a written response to before the consultation closes.

1. Define "local area" as Alston itself

   Confirm in writing that Option 5 means provision in Alston itself — accessible for daily family visits without a significant journey — and not elsewhere on Alston Moor or in any wider administrative area.
2. Pause the consultation and conduct a joint review with NHS partners

   Pause the consultation pending a joint review with North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board and North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust as successor to the 2018 commitment, and confirm what the current joint Better Care Fund plan shows for intermediate care demand in the Alston Moor area.
3. Work with us to hold the NHS to its obligations

   The Parish Council and the League of Friends would welcome the Council's partnership in presenting a united case to the ICB and NCIC that the wrap-around clinical support committed to in 2017–18 must now be delivered. If that support were properly commissioned, the occupancy picture on which this consultation rests would be transformed. We invite the Council to pursue that route alongside us.
4. Honest framing of all options and publication of the capital budget

   Remove the "preferred option" label from the survey form, present all options on equal terms, define "local area" explicitly as Alston itself, disclose the proposed minimum bed count and the full capital budget available for either Option 2 (refurbishment) or Option 5 (new provision), and include the 2017–18 historical context in the consultation document.
5. Publish the Equality Impact Assessment, the employment impact assessment, and the BCF plan

   Publish the EIA completed before the Cabinet decision of 21 April 2026, or confirm that it has not yet been completed. Confirm whether an employment impact assessment has been carried out. Provide the relevant section of the current Better Care Fund plan showing intermediate care demand for the Alston Moor area.
6. Confirm the deregistration plan and the reprovision commitment in writing

   Confirm in writing Councillor Bell's commitment that Grisedale Croft will not close until alternative provision is in place in Alston itself; set out how the Council will protect continuity of care for current residents across the regulatory gap between deregistration and any replacement opening; and confirm what happens if a suitable replacement property in Alston is not acquired.

We recognise that these asks carry cost and complexity. We believe the alternative — proceeding on the basis of a consultation that cannot survive legal scrutiny, built on a cost figure that reflects institutional failure rather than inherent unviability, in breach of the legitimate expectations of a community that has been let down twice before — carries greater cost and greater risk for all parties.

If the Council is willing to pause, to engage the NHS as a partner, to commit in writing to provision in Alston itself, and to put refurbishment on the table as a genuine equal option, the Working Group will engage constructively and in good faith. We want to solve this problem. We want Grisedale Croft to be invested in, upgraded, and made into the residential and step-down facility it was always meant to be. That is a better outcome for the residents of Alston Moor, for the staff of Grisedale Croft, and for the Council. We invite you to pursue it with us.

We are available to meet at any time and to provide any further documentation that would be helpful.