Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jeremy Hunt and James Gray

Tuesday 2nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I take responsibility for everything that happens on my watch. [Interruption.] I think it is a little early to ask the Secretary of State to resign—but maybe not. The ambulance service is under great pressure, but across the country we have 2,000 more paramedics than five years ago, we are recruiting an additional 1,700 over the next few years, and from March this year, compared with March the previous year, the most urgent calls—the category A red 1 calls—went up by 24% and the ambulance service answered nearly 2,000 more calls within the eight-minute period. There is a lot of pressure, we have a plan to deal with it, but we need to give credit to the ambulance service for its hard work.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I stood against Charles Kennedy in 1992 in Ross, Cromarty and Skye and will take the opportunity tomorrow of remembering what a very happy occasion it was and how very glad I was to lose to Charles at that election.

I strongly opposed the creation of the South Western Ambulance Service because I believed the Wiltshire Ambulance Service did a better job on its own. I know the Secretary of State has been monitoring the calls received by the South Western Ambulance Service—one of the two trial areas. Will he tell the House whether response times in the south-west have improved or got worse in recent years?

[Mr Hunt]

NHS England will be updating the House on the results of that trial. It was a very important trial because it was designed to stop the dispatch of ambulances to people who did not need one within eight minutes, in order to make sure ambulances were available for people who did need one. South Western was very helpful in taking part in that trial and we will update the House shortly on the results of it.