PREVIOUS PETITIONS NOW CLOSED  
   

SAVE GP PRACTICES IN BATH

In the second half of 2008, we collected over 1,000 signatures to save our GP practices in Bath. As was reported widely in the media, Gordon Brown's Government has been planning to launch one 'polyclinic' in each Primary Care Trust area outside London. Under Brown's plan, polyclinics are little different from a small hospital and each of them would house about 25 GPs. Polyclinics also have significant draw-backs: they are large, impersonal centres, unlike the independent, local GP practices with doctors and nurses that patients know and trust. This mutual knowledge and trust is particularly important for the most vulnerable patients who need continuity in their medical support - such as frail or long-term ill patients.

Crucially, polyclinics would replace GP surgeries, and in Bath, up to 20% of existing GP surgeries were potentially threatened with closure. Just imagine you live in, say, Newbridge and your local GP got closed down to be replaced with a polyclinic that might be located in Combe Down - or vice versa! Either scenario would severely disadvantage those who are least mobile: the elderly and families with small children, the two largest groups of GP visitors.

But that is not all. A polyclinic for our city would also have threatened the viability of the Royal United Hospital in Bath. If the new polyclinic provided a wide range of diagnostic services, that would reduce much-needed income for the RUH. There are already pressures on the RUH to move services to other hospitals (see earlier petition below), and a polyclinic might well continue the salami-slicing tactic of killing our local hospital through a thousand cuts to its services.

The good news is this risk has been averted. Not least due to the pressure from our petition to save GP services in Bath, our local Primary Care Trust has decided not to launch a large polyclinic in our city, thus saving Bath's GP services. Many thanks to all who have signed our petition to achieve such a successful outcome.
Twerton GP Dr James Hampton is supporting Fabian's polyclinics petition.
   
   

SAVE OUR POST OFFICES

1,000s of people across Britain recently signed the Conservative petition to Save Our Post Offices. But David Cameron went further than that. On Wednesday 19 March, the Conservatives tabled a high-profile motion in Parliament calling for the suspension of the post office closure programme. Gordon Brown's Government only just avoided an embarrassing defeat, as 20 Labour rebels sided with the Conservatives. Now the results for Bath are out: two post offices are saved, the one on Bear Flat and the branch in Lower Weston. A big thank-you to all of you who signed the petition, but remember also to keep using our post office branches in Bath so that their future remains secure.

Campaigning with Cllr Malcolm Lees outside Lower Weston post office which has now been saved.
 
 
Save Cancer Services at the RUH

In May 2008, I submitted 4,000 local signatures from our petition to save cancer services at the Royal United Hospital in Bath to Rhona MacDonald, Chief Executive of the Primary Care Trust for BANES. The PCT had proposed to move operations for gynaecological and possibly head & neck cancer from the RUH in Bath to Bristol. Cllr Dr Anthony Clarke, who sits on BANES Council's Oversight & Scrutiny Committee which called the PCT's cancer plans out for consultation, also attended the hand-over.

4,000 signatories are sending out a clear message: we oppose the planned cuts to local cancer services at the RUH. Bath patients with gynaecological or head & neck cancer will struggle to travel all the way to Bristol for treatment, especially when there are no plans to upgrade significantly the facilities in Bristol to cope with the extra patients.

Our Primary Care Trust is under pressure to comply with Labour's centralised target regime for the NHS, but we need to make decisions based on local clinical results and the needs of patients. The RUH has excellent cancer results. I know PCTs have wriggle room to take local facts into account, and I hope the Trust will listen to the strengths of local opinion and won't implement blindly these bureaucratic plans dreamt up by Gordon Brown's government in Whitehall.

The loss of any important services, such as acute cancer treatment, from the RUH could well endanger its future as the main hospital for the citizens of Bath. That's why this petition is not just about cancer services, but also about securing the future of the RUH as our local hospital.
Handing over 4,000 signatures
to Primary Care Trust Chief
Rhona MacDonald
Talking to cancer sufferer Cllr Richard Maybury (Lambridge) about
our RUH petition
 
 

Stop the State Snoops

In May 2007, lots of people in Bath and North East Somerset got a letter from the Office of National Statistics. They had been selected at random to participate in the trial of the 2011 census forms. "Great", I thought, "that will give everyone a chance to provide some feedback." However, when local residents showed me the kinds of new questions they were being asked, I was so shocked that I decided to launch a petition against the trial census with the Prime Minister.

I hasten to add that I am a civic-minded, law-abiding citizen who has accurately filled in every previous census form. But that would make my predicament even worse. While participation in the trial version was voluntary, not filling in the real census in 2011 would result in a fine of £1,000. And some of the questions added to this new version would make anyone feel tempted to chuck the entire thing in the bin.

For the first time in Britain's history, people will have to tell state inspectors in detail about their health and their sexual orientation. What is more, they also have to write down how often and why they stay in another home. So if you and your partner live in different homes, and you spend your weekends together, you now may have to inform the authorities how many nights you stay over with their girlfriend or boyfriend.

These are very intrusive questions, but many people will point to the Data Protection Act that will keep this information anonymous. Well, I did a bit of research. And what I found out was not reassuring. In September 2006, the Cabinet Office published an "Information Sharing Vision Statement" calling for data protection controls to be weakened. The statement pledged that a comprehensive plan for information-sharing across the public sector was soon going to be introduced. The Guardian had published an article one month earlier warning its readers that " Ministers are to announce next month that they have overturned a key data protection principle which prevents information on individual citizens held by one government department from being passed to another public agency

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/publicservices/story/0,,1856816,00.html

It gets even better. As Conservative MP Michael Gove learnt from a parliamentary answer (Hansard, 12 October 2006, col. 882W), the Government has decided to purchase "geo-demographic" lifestyle data on every home to help computers determine the characteristics of these neighbourhoods. This will allow detailed profiling of people's homes, which may come very useful when deciding on (upward) revisions of council tax bands, for example. Even if none of this were to happen, the problem remains that the best data protection laws in the world cannot protect against criminal abuse or sheer blunders. We all remember the mountains of bin bags full of personal bank statements that were found outside the entrance of a high street bank recently. And we equally remember the personal details of trainee doctors being splashed all over the internet. Mistakes happen. Once the information is collected, it can be used.

When I informed the Bath residents who had raised this issue with me, they came close to ripping up their census form. That would be a shame. We do need the census in order to plan the provision of public services across the country. If lots of people were to defy the fines for non-completion or, even worse (since harder to detect), were to lie about their answers, that would significantly reduce the value having a census in the first place.

That is why I ran an e-petition on the Prime Minister's website. I strongly object to building this Big Brother database of people's lifestyles, and urge the Labour Government to delete these incredibly personal and intrusive questions from the new census. Let's stick to the more limited, existing questions. Out of principle - but also because I want people to feel confident enough to complete these forms truthfully. Adding prying new questions makes that less likely.
Bath residents urging Fabian to protect their privacy from state inspectors.
Promoted by Cllr Dr Anthony Clarke on behalf of Fabian Richter and published by Bath Conservative Association, all of Pitt House, 20 Crescent Lane, Bath BA1 2PX
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