Episode 1 Postcode Lottery

Did you know that where you live dictates what you get?

Even one side of the street can be completely different to another

because every part of our lives is affected by a line on a map and a few letters and numbers.

Well, I'm here to get you a better deal

and to reveal what is really going on in the postcode lottery.

And in today's programme -

we meet the former soldier fighting a life or death postcode lottery.

It's my life and they're saying "No".

They're saying, basically, "Just crawl and go and die somewhere."

We visit the village trapped in an insurance postcode lottery.

When you talk about insurance for property and car,

you're talking about thousands of pounds.

And we reveal one family who fought back against their postcode lottery and won.

Life-changing and completely fantastic.

Are you going to be a winner in the postcode lottery?

Well, I'm here to help you get the right number.

Hello. My Postcode Lottery team and I have been roaming the UK,

looking for the most ridiculous and inexplicable decisions taken about our lives

based on where we live.

And today, we're going to SA9, Swansea in South Wales,

and PO31, Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

But first, we're heading to DN21,

Gainsborough in South Yorkshire.

And let me tell you, this story is truly shocking.

A terminally ill, married father of two young children

is being denied a drug that could extend his life by a few more years,

a drug that is freely available elsewhere in the country.

He's a victim of a postcode lottery that is quite literally a case of life and death.

37-year-old Mark Bannister lives with his wife, Karen,

and their two children, Sophie, six, and Thomas, who is four.

-Are you all right, mate?

-What Sophie and Thomas don't realise

is that their daddy has a brain tumour that is killing him.

Mark is an ex-serviceman who saw active duty for his country

in Ireland and in Bosnia. Returning to civilian life,

he was working as a truck driver when, eight years ago, he first became unwell.

I woke up in the morning, about midnight.

I had two seizures, and because I had two seizures,

they took me to hospital,

and then did a CT scan.

They saw it there and then, and from then on,

it was two days, I was at Sheffield,

having the operation.

The CT scan had revealed the brain tumour - non-cancerous.

The surgeon was able to remove 98% of it,

and radiotherapy helped shrink what remained. But it didn't prove

to be the cure that Mark was hoping for.

Three years later, it came back

and it came back as cancerous.

For the past five years, Mark's family have watched him fight

through every available treatment -

surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

His children have known no other way of life.

Sophie... I mean, she's six now,

but at the time, she was only 12 months old.

I think she took her first steps in the hospital

cos she was backwards and forwards all the time, every single day.

It wasn't very nice, but it was worth doing.

You know, you would.

I was fighting back then, so I'm going to keep fighting now.

Last summer, Mark's fight became even harder

when doctors told him and Karen the news they were dreading.

The cancer had resisted all treatments and was now incurable.

There was, though, one further new drug treatment

that is available to other sufferers - Avastin.

Avastin is not a cure for cancer,

but it slows down a tumour's growth,

which can prolong a terminal cancer sufferer's life for many months, and even years.

Avastin is a drug that costs up to £21,000 per year, per patient.

But because it's a drug that only prolongs life

and doesn't cure the illness,

the government's health advisory body, NICE,

has decided that its cost-effectiveness is unproven,

and has therefore left the decision on whether to fund the treatment

down to the local health authority.

Many primary care trusts are prescribing Avastin

using money from the Cancer Drugs Fund,

a £200 million central pot that allows doctors

to prescribe treatments for cancer sufferers exactly like Mark.

Mark's doctor applied to prescribe Avastin to him in August of last year,

but he was turned down by Mark's primary care trust, NHS East Midlands.

Mark is currently appealing this decision,

but the longer this takes, the worse his condition becomes,

and the less effective Avastin will be, something he is very aware of.

I need it. I need it now as well,

because I'm at the point now where...

..I can cope with the treatment,

whereas six months down the line,

I'm going to be really ill

because of the tumour

and I might not be able to walk. I don't know.

But I'll be really ill then. I might not be able to cope with the treatment.

So if I have it now,

it'll be a lot better for me.

But the tragedy and absurdity of postcode lottery Britain

is that just three-and-a-half miles down the road,

Yorkshire and Humber PCT freely prescribes Avastin.

I just can't believe it, I really can't.

It's just over the water.

I could get it.

I just don't understand how people can say "no" to people.

It's their lives.

It's my life, and they're saying "No".

They're saying, basically, "Just crawl and go and die somewhere."

You know, "Thanks very much, but no."

If it was their family

I'm sure it would be a different decision,

that they would have come with a different outcome.

If Yorkshire and Humber can see that Avastin can benefit brain tumours,

then you just find it hard to believe that they can't.

Trapped in this appalling postcode lottery,

Mark and Karen have become so desperate

that they have seriously considered moving or even splitting up the family

to get access to the treatment.

We'd have a choice that either Mark could move by himself,

or as a family, we could all move.

But I think, practically, it would be easier for Mark

just to go by himself,

but again, that would just disrupt the whole family.

We said to Sophie that Daddy might have to move to get it

and she got quite upset about that.

But as a last resort, he would have to do it.

Sophie instantly cried.

She didn't want me to go.

They understand me moving somewhere,

but they don't quite understand how serious

getting this drug is for me -

you know, that Daddy could die.

I don't really want them to understand it right now.

Later on, down the line, if it does get more serious,

then yes, we do need to bring them into it more.

But I'd rather try and keep them out of it for now,

cos it's stressful enough for me and Karen.

Mark is the clear victim of a postcode lottery,

but he is far from alone in fighting for his right to life.

This is Andrew Wilson from the Rarer Cancers Foundation,

and Rose Woodward, a former cancer patient

who has successfully campaigned for over 200 people to get the cancer drug they need.

Between them, they are helping Mark to fight his cause.

Mark has to get the drug.

We are told that the NHS belongs to the people,

that it will care for us from cradle till grave,

and that it will be there for us

at the end of our lives when care and compassion matter most.

And you couldn't find that in a more deserving and worthy case

than a young man like Mark who would have been willing

to give his life for his country. I can't imagine

a more awful situation than being denied this drug

and Mark's life actually ending, knowing that his country wasn't prepared

to pay out that amount of money for him to have time with his family at the end of his life.

Now, what on earth is going on here?

On one hand, we have a man who has served Queen and country

and all he's asking for is a few thousand pounds

so he can spend more time with his wife and kids.

And on the other hand, we've got a pot of money, £200 million.

Surely a few thousand pounds of that is not too much to ask, or am I missing something?

When the government responded to pressure from campaigners like Rose and Andrew

by setting up the Cancer Drugs Fund,

it was exactly to prevent the kind of postcode lottery

that Mark finds himself trapped in.

So, why has the Cancer Drugs Fund failed to help Mark?

The £200 million allocated annually to the fund is to pay for cancer drugs

that are not currently on NICE's recommended list.

The trouble is that each primary care trust is given a portion of that £200 million

to spend as they see fit.

In the case of Mark's PCT, East Midlands,

they were given £11.6 million from the fund.

But they haven't seen fit to use any of it to pay for Mark's treatment.

Mark, though, is nothing if not a fighter and he refuses to give in.

He's launched his own internet campaign

and his Facebook page attracted over 3,000 supporters in its first week.

Yeah, we've had a fantastic response. If I'm going to keep getting people's names on here,

and get as many as I can, then if I have to, I'll take it down to Parliament.

With the support of his local MP and a number of charities,

Mark continues to lobby East Midlands PCT, as well as the Minister for Health.

Meanwhile, he still lives in the hope that he will somehow be able to get Avastin.

If this drug works,

which, fingers crossed, it does, when I get it

I will keep going for a lot longer

and see a lot more Christmases and birthdays.

If Mark could get it, for us it would make a huge difference,

cos, you know, Thomas is five next month,

but again, if Mark could be here for over a year

he could see his sixth birthday and maybe his seventh birthday.

For a boy who's 37 years old, like me...

HE CLEARS HIS THROAT

..I should have a lot longer left.

I'm not going to stop fighting.

No, I'm not going to stop fighting.

We'll be back later in the programme for an update on Mark's fight to prolong his life.

In these tough times, getting the cheapest home, car, or even pet insurance

can save you hundreds if not thousands of pounds.

Now, we all know we've got to shop around,

but did you know that what you pay is largely dependent on your postcode?

Your neighbour, who lives across the street,

could be saving hundreds of pounds, just because their postcode is different.

To highlight the absurdity of this insurance postcode lottery,

we've gone to Ystradowen in deepest rural Wales.

Ystradowen in West Wales has a population of just under 500

and a Swansea postcode of SA9.

A full 16 miles away is Swansea itself, Wales' second city,

with a Premiership football team and a population of almost a quarter of a million.

Surely the fact that little Ystradowen has a big-city postcode

doesn't really matter, as long as everyone gets the right parcels and letters?

That's all right, isn't it?

Well, not really. You see, all insurance companies use postcodes

as the deciding factor when setting everyone's insurance charges.

And based on their big-city postcode, the rural villagers of Ystradowen

are paying big-city insurance rates, which are costing them hundreds of pounds more

than their neighbouring village of Tairgwaith.

Tairgwaith is only a mile and a half away,

but it has a rural Carmarthenshire postcode of SA18,

and the villagers are paying much lower rural insurance rates,

which has left the people and pets of Ystradowen calling foul,

and demanding that they, too, be given a rural Carmarthenshire postcode.

These fellows are Clive Trotman,

Elwyn Williams and Les Wrangles, local residents

and active members of Quarter Bach Community Council.

Together, they've been campaigning for over four years

to get the Ystradowen postcode changed.

We're compared with Swansea.

That's what the people are annoyed with

because we are rural here

and they compare us with the Swansea area.

It could be anything from £100 to £200-£300,

the difference between car and house insurances.

We are Carmarthenshire, and that's what we are fighting for.

And I'd fight too if I were Clive, because there's big bucks at stake.

Living in Ystradowen, you could end up paying

up to £1,400 more for your car insurance

than next door in Tairgwaith.

Fellow campaigner Elwyn Williams believes it's a postcode lottery

that hits way more than just the pounds in your pocket.

We are very limited in relation to employment locally.

When you talk about insurance for 17 or 18-year-olds,

you're talking about thousands of pounds.

If they are fortunate in having employment,

they're making it impossible for them to reach their place of work.

And it doesn't get any better with house insurance.

Next door, in Tairgwaith,

it would cost you around £160 a year,

whereas in Ystradowen, given your big-city postcode,

that will be anything up to £650, please.

Thank you!

But surely these insurance companies realise that rural SA9, Ystradowen,

is nothing like inner-city Swansea?

SA9 is considered to be, by the insurance companies,

an industrial area. It's more urban,

spreading down towards Swansea, so obviously,

with the crime rates and that sort of thing, we're lumped in with them.

Ah, yes. Crime rates.

In November 2011, 861 crimes were reported and logged in the city of Swansea.

16 miles up the road in rural Ystradowen and neighbouring Tairgwaith

there were a grand total of eight reported crimes in each village.

But whilst Tairgwaith stands as a virtual paragon of love, peace and harmony,

when the insurance companies tack Ystradowen's crime figures onto those of big-city Swansea,

sleepy Ystradowen suddenly looks like a dangerous den of iniquity,

and insurance prices rocket accordingly.

So how has this insurance postcode lottery madness come about?

Well, a lot of you probably think it's your insurance company

using a complex formula of matrices, spreadsheets and calculated risk.

But you'd be wrong. It's actually knocked together by a few letters and numbers

and an arbitrary line on a map otherwise known as your postcode.

But who decides your postcode? The Royal Mail.

The Royal Mail introduced the postcode system in 1959,

purely for the purposes of sorting and directing mail.

But over time, postcodes have become geographical reference points

in their own right. I mean, just ask your sat-nav.

However, the postcode system was never intended or designed

for the calculation of car and household insurance premiums.

But it's the one that all insurance companies use.

We asked MoneySupermarket.com expert Julie Fisher how the system works.

Insurers will use postcodes

as a rating factor when determining your car or home insurance premium.

All insurers will use at least the sector level part of the postcode

to determine your premium, but that actually contains 3,000 households,

and 3,000's definitely a crowd.

The more sophisticated insurers will use the full postcode when determining your premium.

So what they will do is, from your postcode, build up a picture of the area you live in.

They'll do that from both information that's available publicly,

such as crime stats and whether you're in a flooding area

in the case of home insurance,

but they'll also look to the policies that they already have on their books

and the level of claims that they've paid out

to determine how risky your area is.

If only all insurance companies used the full postcode,

then rural Ystradowen wouldn't appear so risky.

But the villagers have finally given up on trying to change the minds of insurance companies.

They weren't really listening, anyway. Instead, they've tried launching a campaign

targeted at Royal Mail.

I wrote to the Royal Mail and this is the answer we have back.

"There are times when we have to make large-scale changes to postal addresses,

"but this is done only on exceptional occasions.

"We will not consider making changes to postal addresses

"which could lead to deterioration in the service we provide."

We did meet with Royal Mail on at least two occasions,

but it's always the same thing -

that the postcode is there for their convenience and other people using it.

But that really isn't good enough.

It doesn't answer the question

in relation to the situation we find ourselves in.

The Postcode Lottery team contacted Royal Mail and we got this statement -

That'll be a "no" then!

So, the postcode was never designed to determine insurance premiums,

but hey-ho, Ystradowen was never designed to be a city.

Or am I just being a bit picky here?

Now, here's a thing. Whilst the Post Office say

that Ystradowen is in Swansea, here is a sign saying, "Welcome to Carmarthenshire."

So, in this bureaucratic world of postcode postcode lotteries,

do all roads lead to the same postcode?

And guess who the villagers pay their council tax to? Swansea?

You've got to be joking! Carmarthenshire.

Every day this week, we're going to bring you a bite-size list

of postcode lottery fame and shame, you know, winners and losers.

The choice of subjects is so wide, you wouldn't Adam and Eve it!

Motorway services, a handy place to spend a penny

and a packet too on service station food.

A team visited 21 service stations across the UK,

operated by the UK's biggest chains, Roadchef, Moto and Welcome Break.

They compared the cost of buying a cheese and pickle sandwich,

a takeaway coffee and a 500 millilitre bottle of water.

The results are enough to give you indigestion.

The top three cheapest service stations, in reverse order, were,

at number three:

It would sell you these three items for £4.75.

In joint first place, two of Moto's service stations:

They sell the same package at a penny cheaper.

And now, the top three dearest for exactly the same sandwich and drinks combo.

At number three:

They'll take £7.39 from your pocket.

At number two:

They charge £7.48.

But the runaway winner, and charging just short of £3 more

than the cheapest services in this survey:

They complete a Roadchef hat-trick by charging £7.68.

It's enough to make you choke on your food.

Let's be honest, I bet we've all moaned about buses at some point

in our life - too many, too few, too late, too expensive!

But a large number of us Brits do rely on a very good bus service -

pensioners, mums, schoolkids,

even me going to the pub on a Saturday night.

But in this age of austerity and cutbacks, it's fast becoming

a postcode lottery whether or not your local bus will even turn up.

With private bus operators putting profitability first, the only way to

keep non-profitable bus routes running is through local council subsidies.

But now, Whitehall is imposing 28% cuts on town hall funding

for 2012, and 70% of local authorities have decided

that one way to help make up the shortfall is by cutting back on buses.

And the bus service postcode lottery is already en route.

For example, in Cambridgeshire, every single subsidised bus route

is being given the axe.

In North Yorkshire, all funded weekend

and evening services are being scrapped.

And in dozens of areas, in order to maximise profits,

free bus-pass holders will no longer be allowed on peak-period services.

But before you hand back your bus pass to save on trees,

perhaps all is not lost.

There are some areas that are kicking back against the bus route

postcode lottery, and there's one place in particular where

a bus service revolution might just lead the whole country down the road to recovery.

To find out more, we're going to Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

Recently, the good citizens of Cowes had to face up

to the consequences of losing their local bus service to council cuts.

Until recently,

we had a council-run operation called Wight Bus, which was running most

of these routes, but it was making a loss of about £150,000 a year.

In addition, we were having to pay Wight Bus the concessionary fares

which were about another £130,000, £140,000 a year.

So the Wight Bus operation was costing the council

something approaching £300,000 a year.

In the current financial climate,

it wasn't sustainable so we needed to look for an alternative.

And the alternative is a unique example of people power

fighting back against the postcode lottery.

Because the locals persuaded the council

and the bus company to do something nothing less than revolutionary.

They got them to hand over the keys.

And so now, the buses of Cowes

are being driven by local volunteers working for free.

But what possesses a private bus company to hand over their buses?

These cuts were being discussed, and certain groups were coming up

and coming to speak to us

and saying, "How easy is it to run a community bus?

"Can you help us to get a scheme going?"

And we kind of sat back and thought, "Oh, my goodness,

"there are going to be lots of groups out there going out

"and trying to buy minibuses and run buses."

And instead of them doing that,

we thought, we have school vehicles that run morning

and afternoon, that pretty much sit around in the middle of the day.

They're already insured, and we can help, so basically

that resource we have sat around all day is there for them to use.

We put the vehicles in, the community puts the volunteers in

and the council put in... The concessionary fare is underwritten.

So everyone's a winner then.

I think it's a really good idea.

They've taken over from the drivers, they're very helpful,

they stop where ever you want them to, not just at stops.

We'd be lost without these buses and these lovely drivers now.

Very friendly.

What about the volunteers? What's in it for them?

It's absolutely everything I expected it to be.

Great fun driving the buses,

wonderful people that we meet out on the route, and providing

a good service in the area as well, so it's all I wanted to be.

And in community-conscious Cowes,

there's been no shortage of willing volunteers.

Originally, we only were looking for five or six volunteers

so to get 30 volunteers to come forward, to want to be involved,

to see the scheme grow was really, really positive.

So meet Stuart Ellis,

the latest rural recruit to the people's bus-driving army.

Stuart is about to sit his test,

and instructor Glenn Crawford is giving him some last-minute advice.

Be aware you're going to get kids coming out of the school,

walking in front of you without thinking.

As you can see, in 100 yards or so, you're going to go into a 40,

so just build it up and now push it on a little bit further,

so that you're getting nearer to the speed limit, by progressing.

Well, I feel Stuart is progressing very well at the moment.

Nervous at first but then everybody is. He's doing very well.

He just needs to build the confidence up, start to progress a little bit

quicker along the main roads, a little bit more observation here

and there, but his progression is very good at the moment, I find.

So how come Stuart has taken on all this responsibility?

I mean, after all, he's not making any money out of it.

I came on board and wanted to be a trainee bus driver, to put

something back into the community.

Often, everyone takes out of the community but doesn't put it back.

But if these buses didn't run, a lot of the community wouldn't be able to get out.

It's important that we've got this service up and running

and we keep it up and running,

so that the elderly in the community can get out, and also the disabled.

They don't have a chance to get out all that often.

It's very important to the community.

So on the surface, it appears to be the perfect example

of a fight back by the losers in the postcode lottery.

But one doubt remains in my mind.

What about the original bus drivers who've lost their jobs?

The drivers who were previously employed by Wight Bus

have been transferred over to the Southern Vectis bus company

so there has been no loss of jobs, which I'm very pleased about.

It is sustainable, so long as we can keep the volunteer drivers coming forward.

That's the key to it, to have sufficient volunteer drivers.

Some of the routes have started off without enough volunteer drivers.

We are recruiting more, and if we can get more

I very much hope that we can continue it in the long term.

Aye, aye, I think the people of Cowes might be onto something here

with their Big Society volunteer service,

and I can see potential to expand the idea.

We could have volunteer coach drivers,

volunteer train drivers, volunteer Tube drivers, even volunteer pilots.

No, pilots, that was a stupid idea. Scrub that last one.

Our next example of postcode lottery madness is one close to my heart.

You see, I've had diabetes for so long now I think God was a boy when I got it.

If you're a type I diabetic like me, it means you have to do

regular injections and trust me, they're a pain in the proverbial.

But there's an ingenious little device out which will save us

from having to do these.

So, we're off to Folkestone in Kent to meet one family who've had to battle the bureaucrats.

Jen McKenzie is a busy mum of three who's been living with diabetes

since she was four years old.

She's spent years laboriously and painfully taking her own blood sugar levels

and injecting herself with insulin, a minimum of four times a day.

It's something that she has no choice about.

Type I diabetes is an autoimmune condition, and the body

gets a bit confused and destroys the cells that produce insulin.

You need insulin to regulate your blood sugar,

to allow you to use the sugars you've got in your blood as energy.

Without it, you die.

So imagine Jen's joy when she was recently prescribed

with the latest breakthrough in diabetes treatment,

an automated insulin pump that completely took away the need for injections.

After 30 years of doing lots of injections a day,

to go onto a pump where

I have to do a set change every two to three days is just marvellous.

The pump automatically drip feeds the right amount of insulin

into the body minute by minute.

And it's one of the biggest breakthroughs in diabetes treatment

since the first insulin injection was given 90 years ago.

The pump has transformed the quality of Jen's life.

BEEP And that's done.

It also gave her and husband Stewart further hope.

Jen and Stewart have three daughters, Harriet, Faith and Erin.

So imagine how they felt when doctors told them

that eight-year-old Harriet

and five-year-old Erin also had type I diabetes.

I cried like I had lost Erin.

She was 25 months old and she was a baby

and I didn't want to have to give her injections.

And then when Harriet was diagnosed, I stopped crying

because she was big enough to understand, so I had to be strong.

When you have children, you don't want their lives to be difficult,

you want them to lead good, happy, fulfilled lives

and you want things to be easier for them.

Following their diagnosis and just like Jen,

Harriet and Erin had to be injected with insulin day and night,

to keep their blood sugar within safe levels.

It was horrible. Erin used to hide, run away.

Harriet was, "I'm going to the toilet." "Come along, Harriet."

"No, I'm going." She just didn't want to come down.

But giving a little one an injection in her bottom in the middle of the night was just...

I remember one time she screamed and the needle came out.

Oh, God, that was awful that time. Do you remember?

And it's not just the injections.

Preventing hypoglycaemia, or hypos - that's when a diabetic's

blood sugar levels fall dangerously low - requires 24-hour attention.

We kept waking them up during the night, giving them biscuits

and milk to deal with hypos because that's what we were told to do then.

And they were putting on quite a bit of weight.

'We were just feeding them up endlessly with extra calories.'

I think maybe after a cake, a piece of fruit would be a better idea.

'So all of your healthy-eating rules which you follow during the day,'

and then you spoil it all because you need to stop them from going hypo.

Trying to wake up a child that young in the middle of the night

-and getting them to eat a packet of biscuits isn't easy.

-No, it's not.

It's like force-feeding someone.

Unsurprisingly then, Jen decided that if her children could

also be given insulin pumps, their lives would also be transformed.

But when she tried to get the pumps, she soon discovered that her family

were the victims of a bizarre and complicated postcode lottery.

I was very lucky, I got mine

because they had just started giving pumps to adults in our area.

But the paediatric doctor didn't believe that pumps

were suitable for preschool children.

The last time we saw the paediatrician in this area,

he had gone from saying they're not suitable for preschool children...

the last excuse is that I wouldn't manage -

I personally, wouldn't be able to manage my own diabetes

and two children on a pump.

Wouldn't be able to manage? What are you talking about?

Jen has been injecting herself, Harriet and Erin

24/7 for years now. In what universe wouldn't she be able to manage

a miracle machine that would put an end to all that?

Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.

But apparently, the kind of backward thinking the McKenzies

were having to put up with is quite normal.

According to the diabetes charity, INPUT,

some consultants will say anything to deny insulin pumps to patients.

My favourites are - pumps aren't available for sporty kids,

pumps aren't suitable for sporty kids,

your primary care trust won't pay for one.

Yeah, righto, we've heard that one before.

My all-time favourite is, if we gave you one, everyone would want one.

Yeah?

But I'm delighted to report that Jen was not going to be put off

by one consultant and a postcode lottery.

She discovered that a nearby primary care trust WAS prescribing

insulin pumps to children.

Stay still, babes, yeah? I need to change your battery.

She also discovered that in England,

a policy called Patient Choice would allow her to shop around

other PCTs for an insulin pump as long as she had her GP's backing.

We got around the postcode lottery, if you like, by using Patient Choice

to go to a different area that was pro-paediatric pump.

We went and we said, could we have them, and they assessed us

and thought we were good candidates.

So we were really lucky that our GP agreed to send us

out of area to see a paediatric diabetologist rather than

the paediatrician that manages diabetes in our area.

Jen lives in England so has access to Patient Choice.

The rest of the UK doesn't.

So, it's hats off to the McKenzies for playing the system

and beating it.

The pumps for us as a family have been liberating, life-changing

and completely fantastic.

We love them and they're part of us.

How corny does that sound?

But they are part of us.

Pumps are really fantastic. They make our lives so much easier!

We're out pretty much all the time.

We can turn our insulin down so I don't have to worry

about topping all three of us up with carbohydrates,

when we're walking up the side of a hill or something silly.

It's just given us so much more freedom.

We don't have to have an injection every day.

I can eat whatever I want, at any time.

We still have hypos and we still have highs, but they're much more easy

to deal with, and not as severe as they were before.

So because we can turn their insulin down,

it means the hypos are far milder than they have been.

Faith, the storm is coming!

We'll surely get to shore!

It's far more normal and routine

and they get to enjoy being children more than they did before.

It's difficult to put into words just how fantastic they are

because we love them so much.

We feel we cheated the postcode lottery

because we used Patient Choice

and we found a hospital that was pro-paediatric pump.

Every diabetic I meet, I say, "Have you heard about pumping?

"You really need to ask for one of these." And they're like, "What?"

I say, "No, ask for one."

Well done, Jen, you're an inspiration to all of us.

You see, what Jen proves is that a bit of research

and a lot of determination can go a long way

when it comes to getting around those postcode lotteries.

Earlier in the programme, we told you the story of Mark Bannister,

a young father and former soldier left fighting for his dignity

and his life by an NHS postcode lottery.

Well, we have news of further developments in his case.

Just before Christmas, Mark was informed that his tumour was

not responding to treatment and that chemotherapy was being withdrawn.

His last hope of receiving Avastin,

the drug that could help prolong his life,

was in the hands of East Midlands Strategic Health Authority.

At the end of January, they gave their verdict on his final appeal.

They...again have said that they won't change their minds,

they won't approve it.

In a document passed on to us by the family,

East Midlands stated that their main reason for turning Mark down

was that they still believed that Avastin's ability to prolong

a patient's life hasn't been clinically proven,

and that there's evidence that the side effects of the drug

can outweigh the benefits.

However, at the end of the four-page document,

East Midlands go on to state that Mark should have taken

the opportunity to move to a GP practice in Yorkshire and Humber,

the neighbouring Health Authority, who do prescribe Avastin.

The panel were perplexed, the letter reads, as to why this simple course

of action was not taken, and gather that other patients have done this.

It is a suggestion that the Bannisters say

they find not only impractical but also morally offensive.

To be honest with you, I was so upset. We were both angry and upset.

My blood boiled when I read that.

You had the opportunity to move surgeries before, but we wanted

to fight to get Mark the drug the right way, the legal way.

They never once said anything about changing surgeries.

But in desperation, Mark and Karen

have now taken the only option they believe was left open to them.

Because Mark was getting symptoms of the tumour

-and the health authority came back with another no...

-It was, that's it.

..we had no choice but to move surgeries.

We got backed into a corner and had no option basically, that was it.

But as a result, Mark is now finally receiving Avastin.

As soon as I told my oncologist that I have moved my surgery,

she put the appropriate paperwork in

and I got a phone call 48 hours later, is that right?

-Yeah, that it had been approved.

-It had been approved.

And a week later, I was on my drug.

Amazing, I couldn't believe it.

It's a bittersweet success for the Bannisters.

I feel that they're promoting it, that's what you should do.

Just simply hop to the other side where it'll get funded.

But again, you're using the Yorkshire and Humber Cancer Drug Fund

which is intended for that area.

-But...

-But what choice do you have?

What choice indeed?

When one trust is openly telling a terminally ill patient

to move to another trust to get the drugs they're seeking,

it clearly points to a healthcare postcode lottery at work

that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

We received the following statement from East Midlands:

And as for the suggestion that Mark should move GP, the statement says:

I think they might be missing the point here - or ducking it.

That's all we've got time for, but there are plenty more scandals

out there and some of them are stinkers!

On tomorrow's programme:

We bring you the heartbreaking postcode lottery

of our homeless heroes.

I get anxious, and start shaking.

We fill you in on the pothole postcode lottery.

We're not a Third World country, we're England, we're British.

We're supposed to have good things.

And be careful where you step.

It's the dog poo postcode lottery.

Stay lucky in the postcode lottery. And if you keep watching,

you'll definitely improve your chances of winning.

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