WANTAGE MP Ed Vaizey has offered to help Wantage Health Centre lobby the Department of Health for expansion funding.

He also promised to do 'anything' he could to help the centre's two GP practices cope with their oversubscription problems in the meantime.

Newbury Street and Church Street jointly applied to NHS England for £4m to expand their shared building on Mably Way last year.

The new space would be essential if the surgeries are to take on more than 12,000 new residents as 5,000 homes are built in Wantage and Grove over the next 15 years.

Newbury Street already has 15,500 patients and Church Street 18,500.

However in November were told the funding was not coming.

Newbury Street practice manager Bob Lewis, who has since retired, said at the time: "Clearly it's not good news and we need to do something, but we don't know what."

Ed Vaizey took up the issue with the CEO of Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group, David Smith, on Friday.

The group is an assembly of county GPs who bid for NHS funding to run all hospitals and health centres in Oxfordshire.

Mr Vaizey raised the issue of capital funding for the expansion of GP surgeries in both Wantage and Faringdon and pledged his assistance.

In a statement he said: "I am going to do everything that I can to help find an answer to the issues currently being faced by the GP’s surgeries in both Wantage and Faringdon."