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Welsh Affairs

My hon. Friend has worked tirelessly in that campaign, and she makes a good, cross-party point. I hope that the Minister will confirm that he will work with her, and with his colleagues in the Welsh Assembly and the Department of Health, to ensure that that preventable and tragic problem is dealt with in the most effective way. To illustrate my remarks about local hospitals in Wales, I shall give an example from my constituency. There is no justification on earth for the closure of Llanidloes hospital, as that will cost lives, not save money. I had a serious accident in 1998, and the hospital saved my life. Many people would not be alive today without the fast, professional and efficient service that staff there have displayed down the years. Closing Llanidloes hospital will merely shift patients further afield, and shunt costs to other budget headings. No one on the local health board has yet been able to explain where the cost savings will come from, and that is because they do not exist. Local health boards were supposed to provide local accountability; that was the whole point, but if they are not responsible to local demand, they cannot do their job and be responsive to local need. In the Liberal Democrat picture, local health provision is vital, and I hope that Welsh Office Ministers will use whatever powers they have to work with their opposite numbers in Cardiff to make sure that the tragic closure of essential services is prevented. That brings me to the third and final element of what we regard as the Welsh health check list—a healthy environment and a sustainable economy. I am very encouraged that the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham and the Secretary of State both said that they are genuinely and seriously committed to the environment. Two key reports in the past six months, the Stern report and the first part of the fourth assessment report from the intergovernmental panel on climate change, have made the case for environmental action more compelling and urgent then ever before. Three certainties arise from those groundbreaking pieces of work—first, that climate change and the environment are, and will remain, of primary concern to humankind for the foreseeable future: secondly, that without concerted action now our lifestyles will have catastrophic knock-on effects on our environment, economies and descendants; and thirdly that, with the right kind of policies, protecting our environment and combating climate do not have to come at the expense of our economies. On the contrary, combating climate change is an economic opportunity, not an economic risk. The lesson is that, by pursuing a sustainable and healthy economy, we can also preserve a sustainable and healthy environment.