Llywydd, I have no difficulty at all in apologising to anybody who hasn't received the service that we would wish them to receive, and I know that the ambulance trust has already done that on behalf of the service directly. In terms of the explanations that the trust offered, I've already referred to the high volumes of calls and the staffing situation that the ambulance trust faces, but the third explanation is also a really important part of this picture: our hospitals are full of people who do not need to be there, but where it is simply impossible to discharge them safely to their own home or into the community, because of the enormous pressure that the social care system is also under at this time. And that does mean that when ambulances arrive at a hospital, they are coming into a system that itself is full of stresses and strains at this time. So, setting targets simply for the ambulance service doesn't result in the improvements that the Member would want to see and I would want to see as well. We have to be able to improve the flow of patients through the hospital so that there is greater capacity to receive people on arrival.

A huge amount of work is going on to try to respond to the stresses and strains that the health service is facing. At the Grange hospital and in Morriston Hospital, where some of these pressures have been greatest, new areas are being devised so that people can be safely taken from an ambulance and into the hospital, start their journey and allow that ambulance to get back on the road again. We are recruiting more people to the ambulance service itself—over 250 additional whole-time posts in the last two years. And there is an unremitting focus, through the ambulance trust and with their colleagues in the district general hospitals, to find ways of preventing the need for people to be transported to a hospital in the first place. All of that is going on all the time.

Despite the pressures that the system is under, Llywydd, in September, over 1,000 red calls were responded to within five minutes, over 2,000 red calls were responded to within eight minutes, and the median response time for a red call in Wales was seven and a half minutes. Despite the enormous pressures that the system is under, I just want to give the Member an assurance that, in all parts of the system, efforts go on every day to try and make sure that people get the service they need and get it in as timely a fashion as possible.