I will consider that. The hon. Gentleman, with whom I have crossed swords in a friendly way many times over the years, knows that my predeliction is always to agree to such a proposition. When I have seen the report from the ambulance officer, if it is the wish of the hon. Gentlemen that we should meet to talk about it further, I shall gladly see whether that can be arranged.

On his comment about seeing this in human terms, I hope that the hon. Member for Houghton and Washington will accept that that is what I want to do. Leaving aside the specific cases to which the chief ambulance officer sought to respond in his paper of 23 December 1986, which on the face of it reveals considerable inaccuracy in the accounts of the cases as put to him in the first place, the human effects of the organisation of ambulance services must in the end be judged by the speed of response to emergency cases, which is what most people regard as the first requirement of an ambulance service.

I am not in a position to engage in a complex statistical argument with the hon. Gentlemen about the basis on which the statistics have been constructed, but I have no reason to suppose that they have not been put together in good faith and on a well-established basis. They show that the response time in the Northumbria ambulance service has improved since restructuring. On that basis I cannot yield to the demands of the hon. Member for Wallsend that I should undertake the actions sought of me in his speech.