I’M writing this on an early train home from London. I’m heading home a bit earlier this week than normal. I took the decision to try to get back to Milnthorpe a bit earlier than usual to avoid the risk of getting stuck down south for the weekend if the weather the country has been threatened with actually arrives.

I am fairly convinced that I can do my best to help those of us who live in South Lakeland wherever I am. My office know to their cost how many emails I can bang off during a train journey between Oxenholme and Euston.

A lot of our work is quite rightly kept a bit quiet. The people we help find homes for, the problems with employers we help sort out; these take up a lot of our time but quite rightly need to be kept a bit confidential. That is why it is brilliant to have some news that I can share and we can all feel chuffed about.

Just before Christmas I presented a petition to parliament asking for the Primary Care Assessment Service that we have at Westmorland General Hospital in Kendal be upgraded to an Urgent Care Centre; 5,000 of you had signed the petition which was really brilliant.

If you were one of those signatories then you now have every right to feel very pleased with yourself, because last week the health minister Stephen Barclay announced that the government had listened to us and we are to get one of the first 150 Urgent Care Centres in the country. Not only that but we should be getting it this spring, so it should be up and running very soon indeed.

This is great news on so many levels. Of course there is the obvious satisfaction of seeing some new investment in our local hospital. Something that I know that many people have at times questioned whether we will ever see again. But for me the satisfaction comes from knowing that there are lots of people in our part of the world who no longer need to drive down the motorway to Lancaster or along the A590 to Barrow to get in to see the A&E departments at the hospitals in those two places. Something that no-one should have to do when the weather is like this.

Added to which, we all know about the pressure that A&E departments are under. We have heard lots of reports from the hospital in Lancaster in particular of the times people have had to wait to get seen and indeed how they have had to wait outside in an ambulance while the hospital tries to find somewhere to fit them in. Having our own Urgent Care Centre in Kendal should take quite a lot of pressure off the hospital in Lancaster and go some way to ensuring that people who need treatment in A&E can get it quickly.

So it’s not just us who will benefit but everyone in south Cumbria and north Lancashire.