Alston Moor Parish Council
On the day Andy Burnham took office as Prime Minister, Alix Martin wrote to him directly on behalf of the Parish Council. The email sets out what this community has already lost since 2014 — the community hospital, the minor injuries unit, the resident midwife and nursing team, and a meaningful ambulance service — and the written 2018 undertaking, made when the hospital’s inpatient beds closed, that has not been kept.
Rather than only asking for help, the email makes an offer: Alston Moor’s isolation, which usually counts against it, also makes it small and precisely measurable enough to prove whether the Neighbourhood Health programme actually works. It asks the Prime Minister for four things: a joint meeting of Westmorland and Furness Council and the North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board with the Parish Council, with the authority to decide something; national test-site status for the Neighbourhood Health programme; honouring the 2018 undertaking in the meantime, with no closure or reduction of Grisedale Croft until genuine replacement exists; and recognition of Alston Moor as a test site for regeneration as well as health — housing, transport and workshops alongside care.
This email takes the campaign’s case beyond Westmorland and Furness Council and the NHS, to national government. It follows the Working Group’s letters of 22 May, 11 June and 17 July 2026, gathered on the Community Case page.