Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to reduce the number of ambulance handovers longer than 15 minutes in emergency departments.

The Government is committed to improving urgent and emergency care performance, including tackling ambulance handover delays and getting ambulance response times back to NHS Constitution standards.

The NHS 2025/26 priorities and operational planning guidance included improving accident and emergency waiting times and ambulance response times as one of four national priorities to improve patient outcomes. The guidance set out the key actions to support reduced ambulance handover delays and improved ambulance response time performance.

An urgent and emergency care improvement plan to further support improvements in services will be published shortly.