Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will bring forward legislative proposals to mandate the location of defibrillators in all businesses and newly built homes.

The Government has no plans to bring forward legislative proposals to mandate the location of defibrillators in all businesses and newly built homes and the Department has made no assessment.

We do not hold information on the number of defibrillators in each English region. NHS England along with partners have developed The Circuit, a national defibrillator network database. The Circuit provides a national database of where defibrillators can be found so that ambulance services can identify the nearest defibrillator at the time of an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. The Circuit is live in in all ambulance services across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The Government has agreed to provide funding of £1 million to design a grant scheme for the expansion of automated external defibrillators that expands the number and accessibility of publicly supported access to defibrillators. Applicants will be asked to demonstrate that defibrillators will be placed in areas where they are most needed, such as places with high footfall, longer emergency medical response times, vulnerable people or due to the nature of activity at the site.