Congratulations to every one of you who campaigned so hard and finally won the human right to have consultant-led maternity services in West Cumbria.

I am delighted for you – as is anyone with a bit of common sense and certainly anyone who can appreciate the absolute danger of having no such services in such a remote geographical area.

What leaves me speechless, however, is that reducing maternity services was ever in the plans at all.

How much money was spent on the Success Regime consultants? How can we sue them under the Trades Description Act? Because I don’t think there would be many in our area who would have considered what they did to our health services as anything like successful.

I now wear by Save Our Beds (SOB) T-shirt to my bed, which is a bit ironic because we couldn’t save the Maryport hospital beds.

My colleagues were pretty certain the week before the announcement that the maternity services were safe. Why else would a former health secretary and would-be Prime Minister have shown his face in Whitehaven last Saturday? I am sure he would have stayed clear of any health facility if the news was bad.

What really bugs me is these people who come down from their ivory towers deep in the most populated cities with plans that might work in those cities and in those towers.

What they totally ignore is the population and geography of areas outside the city.

We had exactly the same problem in New Zealand where Population Based Funding became a four-letter word.

One size doesn’t fit all. Spending X amount per head on someone in a city with a choice of one or two hospitals and plenty of public transport to get them there is one thing. Applying the same formula to families in the remote parts of Copeland or Allerdale is a completely different thing.

There is little transport here. The infrastructure can be bad enough in good weather and is often impassable in winter or during the flooding which has become so much more a feature of our lives here.

We can’t detour to another hospital around the other corner and the Government can’t get the same amount of tax because there are fewer people to tax.

But because we don’t live in densely-populated areas does that mean we have to endure inferior services? We pay the same amount of tax as everyone else and, therefore, should expect the same standards.

And by the way – and this is a BIG by the way – why don’t “they” give us back the money that was spent on trying to reduce maternity services here? I am sure that would fund the service for another couple of years at least.

This is meant to be a happy column and, again, I do congratulate every one of you who fought for this outcome. I even congratulate all the “theys” who finally saw common sense.

Women and babies just became a lot safer.