I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for bringing this short but important debate before the Committee.
The Government fully recognise the importance of ambulance response times and of patients receiving the help they need when they need it. Like other emergency care services in the NHS during the pandemic, ambulance trusts have come under significant pressure, answering almost a million 999 calls in December alone —an increase of 22% on the year before. That is why we have put significant support in place to help ambulance trusts at this time. I will not go into the detail, which we covered in the debate last week. Instead, I will respond to the specifics of the amendment.
It is the Government’s view that it is right that reporting happens at the level of ambulance trust region. Trusts are commissioned to meet response time
targets at a regional level, not at a more granular part of their operating area such as postcode or integrated care board area. It is inevitable that there will be variations in response times within regional footprints from month to month. However, the existing ambulance response time standards already include a mechanism to performance-manage significant variation or long waits for ambulances. All ambulance response time categories include a 90th centile response time standard to measure the “tail” of ambulance response times. This means that trusts are measured on the response to every call they receive and cannot favour some parts of their region over others to game response time targets. Reporting response times down to a postcode level would require a massive expansion to existing reporting that would not be reasonably deliverable.
I also reassure noble Lords that the service transparently provides clinical outcomes data. These indicators were introduced in 2011 and provide detailed information on clinical outcomes for cardiac arrest, heart attack, sepsis and stroke patients. While the Government acknowledge the challenges to ambulance response times and are working hard to address them, for the reasons I set out, I hope the noble Baroness feels able to withdraw her amendment.