A South Wales Evening Post petition signed by more than 90,000 readers has been snubbed by Welsh Assembly health minister Brian Gibbons.

The paper had wanted to hand over the petition as part of its Health Warning campaign, launched after proposals emerged to move neurosurgery services from Swansea’s Morriston Hospital.

Health reporter Liz Perkins had also hoped to present the minister with a dossier of stories from the paper on the campaign’s progress, but he told her that accepting them might suggest a lack of impartiality.

Editor Spencer Feeney countered: “By refusing to look at our coverage, Dr Gibbons runs the greater risk of persuading people that he has already made up his mind — in the opposite direction.”

Dr Gibbons refusing to look at press cuttings presented to him by health reporter Liz at the Assembly building in Cardiff

The paper began its fight after Assembly body Health Commission Wales named Cardiff’s University of Wales Hospital as the site for a new South Wales Neuro Sciences Centre.

The paper says the move would place 178,000 people two hours travelling time – or more – away from a neurosurgical centre, and it is feared that other Swansea hospital services would also be put at risk.

But Dr Gibbons told Liz the consequences would be serious if he appeared to take sides ahead of a consultation deadline, and he believed the petition should instead be handed to Health Commission Wales.

He said: “For me, to receive the petition before the consultation period was finished would be undermining the consultation process.

“The petition should go to the people who are making the decision.

“It’s counter-productive to give it to me, as all I would do is give it back to the people who carried out the consultation.”

But Post editor Spencer Feeney was not convinced, and described the minister’s decision as “nonsense”.

He said: “We only want Dr Gibbons, as the man in charge of our health service, to be aware of the strength of feeling throughout South West and Mid Wales about Health Commission Wales’s proposal to have a single South Wales service in Cardiff.

“In fact, Dr Gibbons would have to have been living in a hermetically sealed bubble for the last few months if he does not know already that there is overwhelming support for our campaign to keep the service at Morriston, for the benefit of everyone who lives in this part of the country.”

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