Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of his Department's policies on maintaining the defibrillator network.

The Department does not maintain the automated external defibrillator (AED) network.

The Circuit is the independently operated national AED database, developed by a partnership of the British Heart Foundation, the National Health Service, the Resuscitation Council UK, and the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives. The Circuit provides a national database of where defibrillators can be found so that ambulance services can quickly identify the nearest defibrillator. There are now over 100,000 defibrillators in the United Kingdom registered on The Circuit.