Your MP writes (From Worcester News)

Your MP writes

9:29am Thursday 12th July 2007 in

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I am with the Worcester News all the way on its campaign to save the ambulance call centre in Bransford from closure.
The idea that you make things more ‘resilient’ by centralising them is a strange one.
The fewer centres you have, the more vulnerable systems become. And I think the local knowledge of the people who work in these centres is a vital complement to the knowledge of the ambulance crews themselves.
But we face an uphill battle.

The ambulance service should never have been made a regional one – it worked very well and should have been left as it was.
But once it had been regionalised, it was pretty well inevitable they would try to close the local centres like Bransford.
Too many of our local services have been regionalised as Worcestershire has lost control to remote bureaucracies in Birmingham. We clung on to our police service after a magnificent local campaign, but for how long?
One of the reasons people are switching off from politics is that they feel powerless – and the drift of local services from our county to Birmingham makes the powerlessness worse.
What we need to do is to give real power back to local communities for them to decide how they should live their lives.
I’m delighted that one of David Cameron’s pledges is that a new Conservative government will scrap the regional assemblies.
It is the West Midlands assembly that, taking orders from the government, is currently planning to impose far too many new houses on the south of the county.
Of course local councils need to co-operate with their neighbours to make sure things are done efficiently, but that can be done without trying to run every vital local service from Birmingham.
The reason that the Bransford centre is under threat is the government’s obsession with regionalism. I prefer localism!
On a brighter note, I was briefed last week by Central Trains about rail services to Birmingham from the county.
I was delighted to see how positive they were about the new arrangements when the franchise for these services change to GoVia in November.
The crucial plans to build a new station at Bromsgrove are well advanced – if this new station is built we can run longer trains from south Worcestershire to Birmingham which will increase capacity and reduce overcrowding.