It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I am grateful to Sarah Dyke for securing the debate. I thank all the hon. Members who have taken part, including my hon. Friends the Members for Redditch (Chris Bloore), for Ilford South (Jas Athwal) and for Wolverhampton West (Warinder Juss), and the hon. Members for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) and for South Devon (Caroline Voaden), as well as the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, Helen Morgan, and the shadow Minister, Dr Johnson. I will endeavour to deal with as many issues and questions as I can. If I do miss any, will hon. Members please get in touch with me afterwards, and I will make sure they are picked up?

The hon. Member for West Suffolk mentioned the commitment made by the Secretary of State to meet him and visit his constituency, and I will ensure that that issue is raised. The parliamentary private secretary, my hon. Friend Deirdre Costigan, is here, and I am sure she will be happy to pursue a response. We will also do what we can to get a response from the Treasury for the shadow Minister.

The hon. Member for Glastonbury and Somerton and other hon. Members rightly raised constituents’ experiences of long waits for an ambulance response. I put on record my deepest sympathies for the hon. Lady’s constituent Jim on the loss of his wife. As the Secretary of State has made clear, this is not the level of care that staff want for their patients, and it is not the level of care that this Government will ever accept for patients.

Lord Darzi investigated the issues facing the NHS, and his report was honest about the challenges facing the health service. Urgent and emergency care performance remains a long way from a resilient position and there is continued high demand for A&E and ambulance services, with ongoing seasonal winter pressures. For example, in December the London Ambulance Service recorded more than 121,000 incidents, the highest on record for the service. Improvement needs to happen across the urgent and emergency care pathway and through the expansion of neighbourhood health services.

Nationally, congested emergency departments reduce the productivity of ambulance services, a matter that I think almost all hon. Members raised. A huge amount of time is lost to ambulance handover delays because there is no space for patients. Having crews tied up waiting outside hospitals exacerbates poor ambulance response times. We have also seen the continued normalisation of corridor care. We will never accept patients being treated in corridors; it is unsafe and undignified. We are investing an extra £26 billion to begin turning around the NHS, and we will do all we can, as fast as we can, to consign corridor care to the history books.

Lord Darzi’s investigation into NHS performance highlighted wide variation across different parts of the country. The situation is unfair to patients and goes against the principle of a universal service. I acknowledge that there can be challenges in rural areas, where longer distances often mean that patients wait much longer for ambulances than in urban areas. I often find myself in this place with the hon. Member for Glastonbury and Somerton, and we both talk about the experience in our rural constituencies. I assure her that that is on my agenda. As she says, ambulance response times for the south-west and some other areas highlight the rurality differential.

In January, the South Western Ambulance Service’s average response for category 2 emergency incidents, which include strokes and heart attacks, was 51 minutes and 45 seconds, which is 26 minutes longer than the best-performing ambulance trust in England. The NHS constitutional standard for category 2 average response times is 18 minutes, and no ambulance trust in England has met that target since the pandemic. This cannot go on. Prioritising patient safety will always be the Government’s and the NHS’s main focus. We are committed to getting A&E waiting times and ambulance response times back to NHS constitutional standards.

The independent review of ambulance trust culture was published in February 2024. Its recommendations included addressing workforce pressures. NHS England is working closely with ambulance trusts to implement those recommendations. We have made some significant investments in the ambulance workforce, and the number of NHS ambulance staff has grown by 9% compared with last year, but we recognise that there is much more to do on retention and wellbeing for ambulance staff. That is something that we will continue to work on.

We cannot keep plugging the gaps. There is a need for more fundamental reform. We have been clear that there are no quick fixes and that to turn things around will take investment and reform. We have provided the highest real-terms capital budget for the NHS since before 2010. We announced an extra £22.6 billion in day-to-day health spending and an additional £3.1 billion further capital investment over two years. That extra investment will be accompanied by fundamental reform, of which ambulance services.

In January, the Government published “Road to recovery: the government’s 2025 mandate to NHS England”, which clearly sets out delivery instructions for the NHS through the prioritisation of the five key objectives aimed at driving reform in the NHS. Improving A&E and ambulance service performance was also one of a small number of prioritised objectives in the Government’s mandate to NHS England to specifically start to address the current challenges facing urgent and emergency care.

In turn, NHS England’s planning guidance for this year includes the target to improve average category 2 ambulance response times to no more than 30 minutes across 2025-26. The guidance also sets out a range of key actions for the NHS to deliver in the same timeframe, focused on reducing avoidable ambulance dispatches and conveyances and reducing hospital handover delays.