Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help support shops, small businesses and public buildings to host publicly accessible defibrillators.

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 were added between September 2023 and July 20225, many as a result of local community led action.