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 defibrillators in key public areas.

The Government’s position is that local communities are best placed to make decisions about procuring, locating, and maintaining defibrillators. Over 110,000 defibrillators are registered in the United Kingdom on The Circuit, the independent automated external defibrillator database. Over 30,000 of these have been added in the past two years, many as a result of local community-led action. For this reason, the Department has not made an assessment on this issue.