21 October - Council Health Scrutiny Committee - what a bunch of hypocrites!
Friends I have made through this website have persuaded me that I should
attend council committee meetings and this evening I did exactly that and
attended the Health Scrutiny Committee meeting. I’ve not
followed the shenanigans at Sidcup hospital as closely as I might have done but
in essence the council is fighting a rear-guard action that it cannot possibly
win against the closure of Queen Mary’s Hospital’s Accident & Emergency
Department (A&E) and its maternity unit leaving Bexley the only London borough without either.
I listened to the health authority’s chief executive (Dr. Streather)
put his case to the council and I came to the conclusion that through
his mismanagement Queen Mary’s has failed to recruit enough staff and run up
losses of more than £40m a year and Streather now believes that the only way out
of trouble is to close bits of it down. To achieve this in the face of council
objections and a government moratorium on the closure he has ignored all public
comment by manipulating the cut off date for its submission and exploited legal
loop-holes to get around all official protest and
a promise by the local MP, James Brokenshire.
The council’s health committee chaired by councillor Ross Downing (Conservative,
Cray Meadows) put up a show of protesting when they did not in law have a leg to
stand on and with the notable exception of councillor Sharon Massey (Conservative,
Danson Park) no one put a question to Streather worth asking and certainly didn’t
get an answer worth listening to. The A&E closure will happen in November and the
maternity unit a month later and Bexley council is powerless to stop it.
I couldn’t help noticing the irony of it all. Here we have a public body that
ignored the results of consultation and played fast and loose with the law to
win its way over the wishes of a council who may be indignant and annoyed by it
all or might just be pretending to be. Either way it is an object lesson in
hypocrisy by Bexley council who ignore local residents and ride
rough-shod over
them through a mixture of incompetence, profligacy, mismanagement and
lawlessness at every opportunity. If it wasn’t so serious it would be hilarious.
The committee chairman waffled on and off for nearly two hours, rudely cut off
questions from a member of the public who had been allowed to speak and provoked
whispers of “sanctimonious cow” from the listening public; ungallant but a fair
enough description. In two weeks time I shall attend a similar meeting on the
proposed council cuts. Based on councillor Downing’s performance tonight
chairing an aimless mess of a meeting that achieved nothing whatever I think I
know where my axe would fall.