Oral Answers to Questions

Lisa Nandy Excerpts

Tuesday 27th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Norman Lamb]

I acknowledge the hon. Gentleman’s work on promoting the case for psychological therapies, including mindfulness, and would be happy to meet him and a delegation of experts. The Government have massively increased psychological therapies—nearly 1 million people in the past two years accessed psychological therapies through the improving access to psychological therapies programme. We are totally committed to improving access to psychological therapies to cure the imbalance in access to services for people with mental health problems that has existed for a very long time.

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

16. What assessment he has made of the possible effect on patient safety of reductions to ambulance trust budgets.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Dr Daniel Poulter)]

The budgets for individual ambulance trusts are set by local health care commissioners. In 2012-13, the budgets are increasing nationally by £2.5 billion. To ensure patient safety, ambulance trusts are required to meet national performance standards in respect of their response times.

[Lisa Nandy]

Does the Minister share my concern that 100,000 more patients than two years ago wait more than half an hour to be transferred from ambulance to A and E? If so, how on earth can he justify making his top-down reorganisation of the NHS a priority rather than sorting out that appalling situation?

[Dr Poulter]

The priorities for local ambulance trusts and the funding allocations are set locally. The hon. Lady will be pleased that between 2010-11 and 2011-12, an additional £9 million was put into the front line of the ambulance service in her area to help address some of the problems she outlines. Under this Government, more money is going to the NHS than before and more money is going into local ambulance services—£2.5 billion nationally. We should contrast that with the approach taken by the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) on the Opposition Front Bench, who said that to increase spending to address those problems would be irresponsible.