I begin by responding to the last remark. I am sorry to have deprived the hon. Member for Jarrow (Mr. Dixon) of the pleasure of having my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security in his direct sights. I should explain that my hon. Friend was faced with some difficulty in being able to respond to the debate tonight and I thought that it would be appropriate if I responded.

I am happy to have the opportunity to discuss the matter with hon. Members. I appreciate the strength of feeling. Although I have not checked the statistics mentioned by the hon. Member for Wallsend (Mr. Garrett), I have no reason to doubt his word that he is an infrequent raiser of matters on the Adjournment of the House. I fully accept that that reflects the importance that he attaches to the matter. I note that the hon. Member for Houghton and Washington (Mr. Boyes) is in the Chamber and I know that he has raised this matter before on the Adjournment. I am also aware that the hon. Member for Jarrow has been concerned about this for some time. The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, East (Mr. Brown) is present and I know that he takes a considerable interest in this matter.

The difficulty that I face in answering tonight has two parts. First, a number of specific instances were raised in the past few minutes by the hon. Member for Jarrow upon which necessarily I am not able to comment off the cuff. However, I will see what further information I can gain from the authority about the particular cases raised by the hon. Member for Jarrow if they can be identified from the information he has provided on the Floor of the House or should he wish to give me further information to enable me to seek the authority's comments.

I am conscious that I must resist some part of the thrust of the comments made by the hon. Members for Wallsend and for Jarrow that the regional health authority and the ambulance service — including the chief ambulance officer—and I do not pretend to be quoting hon. Members accurately; I merely give the flavour of what they said—have persistently refused to respond to some of the points that have been made. I happen to have on file comments made by the regional ambulance officer on 23 December last year in response to a report commissioned by Prudhoe town council. I understand that the report had only been published on 8 December 1986. Frankly, by the standards of central Government, that is a fairly full and detailed response to a report published within not much more than a fortnight of the publication of the original document, and it includes detailed comments on a number of specific cases that had been raised. Whatever else has been said about the response, it constitutes a serious attempt to respond to the criticisms that had been put forward.

It would be less than fair to the authority and the chief ambulance officer on the evidence of the papers that I have concerning this matter, not to acknowledge that an attempt to respond has been made. However, I fully understand in the light of what hon. Members have said, that that response has not satisfied them or manifestly, on the basis of what they say, some of their constituents.

I cannot make immediate comment on specific cases although I will undertake to have those cases examined. It is right to record that according to the papers that I have, response has been made to particular cases and points that have been raised in reports in the past. I may refer to that point later.

The second difficulty that I face is perhaps closer to the fundamentals of the case put forward today. As has been acknowledged on both sides, this is not the first occasion on which the Northumbria ambulance service has been discussed in the House. I have looked at the report of the last debate and noted the undertaking given by the then Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Mr. Patten). He said that he did not expect standards to be reduced but rather that they would be improved, and he referred to early evidence that efficiency of response in terms of emergency ambulance services had improved rather than deteriorated. All the evidence that I have seen from the intervening period confirms that in response to emergency demands the Northumbria ambulance service has improved its record. I will give some of the statistics in a moment. Against that background, I must confess to some puzzlement about the reasons for raising the subject again today. At any rate, I start from the position that in my judgment the northern regional health authority, which is responsible for the running of the service, has sought to allay the fears expressed, has been monitoring the service provided and aims to maintain what appears to have been an improvement and to make further improvements.

I justify my comments about what appears to have happened on the basis of statistical evidence of improvement especially in the emergency service since the restructuring began. The statistics show clearly that ambulances are getting to emergency cases faster and that within six months of the closure of Prudhoe ambulance station 95 per cent. of emergency response times were within 20 minutes, compared with 73 per cent. before—an increase of more than a quarter and not far short of a third. In the period 1 October to 25 November 1986—the latest figures available to me—all emergency calls in the Prudhoe area were responded to within 14 minutes, which is better than the standard set by the Department for areas of that kind and reflects the fact that even in the usual areas the regional health authority has deliberately set standards which are more commonly expected in the metropolitan areas with their closer-knit populations and generally shorter journey times. I understand that even the people campaigning for the reopening of Prudhoe ambulance station, which is part of the background to today's debate, acknowledge that in this respect the service has improved since restructuring. They believe that there is room for further improvements, and that may well be so. I should be the last to say that I regarded any ambulance service as having achieved perfection, and hope that any authority concerned with services of this kind will seek to maintain and in every possible way to strengthen its efforts to ensure that the service is as efficient as it possibly can be.

With those figures in mind — I am not aware that anyone has seriously disputed the improvement in response times to emergencies which has taken place in the Northumbria ambulance service since restructuring—I am somewhat puzzled at the extent to which the concern persists. I do not dispute the fact that it persists—if it did not, hon. Members would not be here for this debate.