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Access to NHS Services

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that very important point. We have argued in this House many times that both safety and access need to be considered when one is talking about maternity services. Safety is an essential element of quality of care, and choice and access are highly desirable elements, but the evidence base of safety is absent from service reconfigurations such as the one affecting his constituency. We are happy to see that the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis), still has his Front-Bench place. He is the Minister responsible for maternity services, and we have asked him many questions about how great should be the distance that people must travel between, say, a birth centre or a midwife-led unit and a unit providing consultant-led obstetric care. He does not know the answer and has provided no guidance, but at the same time the Department of Health is driving ahead with service reconfigurations across the country. Ostensibly, those reconfigurations are about safety, but no evidence is produced to support that. I do not see how one can have safety without evidence.