Oral Answers to Questions

Andy Burnham Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the way targets are set up. It is possible for ambulance services to hit their targets while not delivering a satisfactory service to the most rural areas, and we have discussed that issue a number of times. Because we are in the middle of a challenging winter, we do not think that now is the right time to review the issue, but he should rest assured that we are keeping it under review.

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

Although focus has been on A and E, it is becoming clear that the knock-on crisis in the ambulance service is more serious than people realise. Evidence is emerging of services unilaterally abandoning national standards and putting patients at risk. We know of one ambulance service that left patients at the door of A and E without handing them over to A and E staff, and last night East of England ambulance service was forced to release an internal report on the downgrading of thousands of 999 calls, including calls made by terminally ill patients. The report covered only a sample, but it showed that at least 57 of those patients died after a decision was taken not to send an ambulance. Withholding ambulances from terminally ill people is the most cruel form of rationing imaginable. Will the Secretary of State today order a full, independent investigation into how that happened, and into every death or adverse incident?

[Mr Hunt]

We investigate deaths and adverse incidents carefully, and the East of England ambulance service got £3.6 million of extra support to help it this winter. Let us look at what is happening in the ambulance service. Year on year, the number of the most serious category A calls—those that need to be answered within eight minutes—has increased by 26% over one year, and the number of ambulances dispatched within eight minutes has increased by 22%. That is 1,900 extra ambulance journeys arriving within eight minutes, which is a record of an ambulance service doing well under a lot of pressure. The right hon. Gentleman should be getting behind the paramedics and ambulance services, not trying to politicise the issue.

[Andy Burnham]

I raised a very serious issue, which came to light last night, regarding 57 terminally ill patients. As that was only a sample, it is not the whole story. I am surprised that the Secretary of State did not answer the very specific question about a serious failure in the East of England ambulance service. The truth is that this is not confined to the ambulance service in the east of England. Last year, we heard of a 77-year-old great-grandfather from Bolton who waited for more than four hours on a freezing pavement and a 92-year-old grandmother who tragically died after waiting for five hours in agony on the floor of her home in Muswell Hill.

Whatever the Secretary of State says, those are not isolated cases. New figures last week showed that in November a staggering 17,000 critically ill patients who were classified as needing an urgent category A 999 response waited longer than 19 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. Will the Secretary of State agree that this chaos is now putting lives at risk and cannot carry on? Will he tell the House what precise steps the Government are taking to bring responses to 999 calls back up to acceptable standards?

[Mr Hunt]

But we are taking measures. That is why we have 2,000 more doctors and 5,000 more nurses compared with a year ago. Frankly, the last thing those doctors and nurses on the front line want is scaremongering by the right hon. Gentleman—posters saying that the NHS might cease to exist under this Government; and leaflets like the one I have here from Lancaster saying that the local hospital might close. We are backing the NHS with more doctors, more nurses, more resources and a long-term plan. Will he now back the NHS by disowning this kind of scaremongering and stop trying to weaponise the NHS?