Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to bring forward proposals to require publicly funded bodies to ensure defibrillators are accessible to the public on a 24-hour basis.

It is for individual publicly funded bodies to determine appropriate arrangements for the defibrillators they maintain, taking account of relevant factors such as building operating hours and security. More broadly, local communities themselves are best placed to make decisions about location and access to defibrillators. The number has been increasing, with over 110,000 defibrillators now registered in the United Kingdom on The Circuit, the independent automated external defibrillators database. For these reasons, there are no plans to bring forward such proposals.