Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of ambulance response times.

We have been clear our assessment is that ambulance response times have been wholly inadequate in recent years. Patients with serious conditions such as suspected strokes waited over 34 minutes on average last month for an ambulance to arrive – nearly twice as long as the 18-minute standard.  This Government is committed to returning the NHS to the Constitution’s standards.