Letter to Chris Grayling MP

to GRAYLING, Chris
date 13-Jun-2007 14:37
subject Re: Hospital Campaign

Dear Chris,

I have been following your campaign against the closure of Epsom's impatient and maternity services, I've been copied in to developments, and hope you and everyone else involved in the campaign manage to force a rethink during the public consultation process. That is, if it doesnt turn out to be yet another ' consultative' sham.

You will recall that the Surrey and Borders & Partnership Trust was forced to do a very embarassing u turn over their treatment of the Old Moat Garden Centre workers . This shows that public opinion does matter and can make a difference on the other hand it has been over a year since SABP and the Surrey PCT announced plans to ' modernise' the Old Moat Garden Centre and yet we still do not know what their new plans for the centre and its workers and users are.

I have repeatedly asked the Surrey PCT to make public the revised proposals for the centre submitted by the Richmond Fellowship earlier this year, proposals there has been no public consultation about , but the PCT refuses to place this information into the public domain.

The Richmond Fellowship is the sole bidder so there are no commercial confidentiality issues .

The Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health (SCMH) academics who were involved in this modernisation process received over £40,000 in public money. One of those academics, Dr Bob Groves also sat on and advised the Remploy Taskforce that recently decided to 'mainstream' away over 2000 disabled peoples sheltered Remploy jobs . This was also done in the name of modernisation without the disabled workers being consulted at all.

Dr Groves is seconded to the DWP and also exercises massive leverage within NIMHE, a useless but powerful Government quango set up by SCMH, ( costs million £60 and rising ) so what is actually driving these top down decisions isnt Dr Groves' self proclaimed 'world leading expertise' but his and SCMH's slavish , unobjective and non independent blind allegiance to politically correct Government policy.

The Government politically objects to sheltered employment and has decided that everyone must be subject to market forces, irrespective of whether people can actually cope with this.

The ongoing situation with the Old Moat Garden Centre is evidence that this Government, NIMHE, SCMH and some of the other major disability charities are more interested in pushing their dogma than its impact on disabled peoples lives.

Changes to public services should be made after the experts have thought them through and meaningfully discussed them with service users and the public , not before as here.

Your constituents are currently paying for the chaos SCMH left behind at SABP , whereas Dr Groves and his fellow SCMH academics and associates are rushing ahead to pick up their next publicly funded paychecks for advising public services to 'mainstream' their complex employment and therapeutic activities problems away. This approach is fraudulent, reckless and wrong.

Des Curley