Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he has considered introducing a national defibrillator strategy.

The Government’s position is that local communities are best placed to make decisions about procuring, locating, and maintaining automated external defibrillators (AEDs). Over 110,000 defibrillators are registered in the United Kingdom on The Circuit, the independent AED database. Over 30,000 of these have been added in the past two years, many as a result of local community-led action. For this reason, there are no plans to introduce a national defibrillator strategy.