Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to reduce the ambulance response times for (a) strokes and (b) other category 2 emergencies; and what consideration he has given to adding strokes to category 1 emergencies.

As announced in the Autumn Statement, the Government is investing an additional £3.3 billion in each of 2023/24 and 2024/25 to enable to enable rapid action to improve urgent and emergency, elective, and primary care performance towards pre-pandemic levels. In the coming weeks the National Health Service will set out detailed recovery plans to deliver faster ambulance response times.

This is in addition to significant investment in NHS and social care capacity to help improve patient flow and reduce ambulance handover delays. The NHS winter resilience plan will increase NHS bed capacity by the equivalent of at least 7,000 general and acute beds, and an additional £250 million has been made available to enable the NHS to buy up beds in the community to safely discharge thousands of patients from hospital, and capital for discharge lounges and ambulance hubs. This is on top of the £500 million already invested last year.

No such consideration of strokes has been made by the Department. The clinical prioritisation of 999 calls is an operational matter for the ambulance service.