Jamie Stone

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Sam Rushworth) on a sincere and thoughtful speech. I am indebted to a lady called Elspeth Husband, a community first responder in Caithness. She made a point to me that echoed exactly what the hon. Member said about VAT: she services defibrillators, and the cost of pads and batteries is all subject to VAT. That seems straightforward wrong for such important lifesaving equipment. She also suggested that the same law that applies to lifebelts should apply to defibrillators—in other words, it would be an offence to use one wrongly or to remove one. I ask the Government to consider tightening up on that. All the right points have been made about why defibrillators are so important, but I draw attention to my constituency, which is the northernmost, the most remote and the largest in the UK. Hon. Members can imagine that an eight-minute response time is extremely difficult in the area that I have the honour to represent. That is compounded by a decision taken by the Scottish Government in 2016 to centralise maternity services in Inverness, which obliges mothers to make a 200-mile round trip from the north of my constituency to give birth. I have talked about this many times in this place, and I am sorry if I have bored Members on the issue. Let us think on this: when the ambulance goes from Wick, Thurso, Bettyhill or a remote part of the north coast to Inverness with the mum on board, if somebody has a cardiac arrest, the defibrillator has headed south in the ambulance. To me, that is straightforward bonkers. That kit, which is vital for life saving, could be on the road many miles from where it is needed. To my mind, that is a perfect example of not-joined-up Scottish Government thinking, which is a disgrace. I conclude by saying this: I am more than disappointed that there is not a Scottish National party Member here to take part in this debate, because health does not respect boundaries between states or countries. Health is for everyone.