Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what was the average waiting time for an ambulance (1) in the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, and (2) across all NHS trusts in England, in each year since 2000.

Ambulance response time standards were reformed following the recommendations of the Ambulance Response Programme in 2017, including the publication of average response times.

We recognise the pressures the ambulance service is facing which is why we published our Recovery Plan for Urgent and Emergency Care Services. The ambition is to deliver one of the fastest and longest sustained improvements in emergency waiting times in the National Health Service's history. We aim to reduce average Category 2 response times to 30 minutes this year with further improvements towards pre-pandemic levels next year.

Ambulance response times are recorded at an ambulance trust level. Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust is served by South West Ambulance Service. The following table shows the South West Ambulance Service average response time since the introduction of the standards in August 2017.

South West Ambulance Service average response times (hh:mm:ss)

The following table shows the National average ambulance response time since the introduction of the standards in August 2017.