NHS at 70 – Save St Helier Hospital: On Saturday 7th July 2018 I went with campaigners from Keep Our St Helier Hospital on what seemed a long hot march from Sutton to a rally in front of St Helier Hospital.
The Epsom and St Helier Trust planned to close A&E, Maternity, Paediatrics, Emergency Medicine and Surgery, Intensive Care, Coronary Care and the Cancer Centre at one or both Epsom or St Helier Hospital and sell off much of the sites.
The march celebrated the 70th anniversary of the founding of our National Health Service and marchers signed a giant birthday card at the start of the march in a park in the centre of Sutton and many had had posters and placards for the 70th birthday of the NHS.
But there were also plenty of placards calling for the local hospitals – St Helier, Queen Mary’s and Epsom to remain open and offering a full range of services.
There was a great deal of support shown for the march as it went through the long Sutton High Street, with many shoppers stopping to applaud, and a few joining in the march, at least for a short distance.
The march stopped at several places in the High Street for short speeches about the plans and the need to oppose them.
Many on the street seemed surprised to learn their local hospitals were under threat. The death of so many local newspapers – and few of those left are still truly local, publishing largely material unconnected with their local areas, owned by a couple of large national companies – has led to a real lack of reporting of local issues, and many people are now ill-informed on them.
The march continued through the huge 1930s estates in the area until finally we were in sight of St Helier Hospital.
It was a hot day and there was little shade on the route and although it was only around a two mile walk it felt much more.
As we arrived for a rally on the large grass open space in front of the hospital we were greeted by others who had come there, including the National Health Singers who were waiting to sing for us in front of a tent with the message ‘The Clock Is Ticking For Your Hospital’
There were free buns to celebrate NHS 70 and of course speeches by campaigners and people staged a die-in to represent the deaths that would result from the closure of the hospital,
Closure of vital services here or at Epson would leave around half a million south Londoners with much poorer access to NHS services. As I noted, “People would have to travel longer distances through increasingly congested roads to reach full hospital services at St Georges Tooting and elsewhere, a journey which might take 20 minutes when traffic was light but much longer when roads were congested; even in ambulances there would be more dead on arrival or whose condition had seriously deteriorated.”
The plans are a part of a long-term campaign by successive governments to reduce NHS spending and to hand over much of the NHS to private health providers, which is continuing under the current Labour government, many of whose members receive considerable funding from such companies. In February 2026 the BMJ published an article which included the estimate from the Good Law Foundation that then Health Secreatry Wes Streeting “had accepted a total of £372,000 of donations from donors linked to private health between 2015 and 2025.“
Despite their long campaign, more services are being removed or under threat of removal from both hospitals as a part of a plan to reduce the number of major acute hospitals in the country. In 2020 the trust was still planning to sell off around two thirds of the current St Helier site, including the Queen Marys Childrens Hospital, Furguson House, the Maternity Unit, Womens’ Health, the renal unit, the teaching block and the large car park.
This year the trust was awarded £57m to improve its emergency ward and is to “temporarily relocate the women’s health block at St Helier” but there are fears locally that maternity services will not return to the hospital.
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