“The NHS has failed to put in place plans to meet Rugby’s growing population” – Ed Goncalves

Speaking at Bilton's Churches Together election hustings last night Ed Goncalves said that the NHS lacked a clear plan to match health service provision to population growth in Rugby.

Dr Roy Carson had raised a question about GP surgery closures and the future of St Cross. There has not been a GP's surgery in the east of the town since the old Community Health Council rubber-stamped proposals to close the Moyeady Avenue surgery and now GPs surgeries to the north of the town are also closing.

Ed Goncalves insisted that the Liberal Democrats were the only party to have a fully funded plan to provide the NHS with the extra £8 billion that Simon Stevens the chief executive of the NHS in England states that the service needs. Some of the additional funding should be used to open new surgeries and bring back services to St Cross said Mr Goncalves.

The five candidates who turned up for the hustings faced a grilling from the audience on a wide range of issues ranging from Palestine to selling off housing association homes. The debate was mainly good humoured with a lot of agreement between the candidates. However the Labour candidate's assertion that the last Labour government had left the Treasury in a healthy condition was not well received by the audience and she was reminded that the last Labour finance minister had left a note for his successor saying "there's no money left".

UKIP's candidate was left gasping for a response when in the middle of a serious debate about how in the long term the country could provide adequate care for growing numbers of very elderly citizens and a declining proportion of the population of working age a member of the audience suggested we might want to hire some foreign workers to fill job vacancies.

Perhaps the sharpest confrontation of the night was on the question of food banks. Not many people at the hustings believed the conservative candidate, Mark Pawsey, when he said that the sharp rise in the use of food banks in recent years was because Labour had banned them from advertising themselves and the government had now given them the freedom to do so.