As has been highlighted during this debate already, many communities in mid Wales are feeling increasingly abandoned in their access to wider health provision. There's no general hospital in Powys, and previously available services—at Llanidloes and Newtown, for example—have been downgraded, and ambulance response times continue to fall shamefully short of critical targets. Under the wider pressures of austerity, this running down of services has often been justified by the sparseness and rurality of the mid Wales population. Despite consistent warnings from Plaid Cymru about its long-term consequences, there has been a historical drive to centralise services in more urban settings, and we are therefore seeing the dire consequences of this playing out this winter.

It is precisely the rurality of mid and west Wales’s communities that makes an effective local emergency response all the more vital. We have an ageing population, high numbers of people undertaking open-air activities, high numbers and prevalence of farming and agricultural activity, and what have been recently acknowledged as the most dangerous roads in Britain. This all means that our rural communities are rife with potential medical emergencies, to which timely responses are both critical and made difficult by a complex geography. While local healthcare provision has been hollowed out in these communities, the air ambulance has been the one constant—seen by many as a vital safety net.