Ambulance trusts 'give false 999 figures'

Half of all ambulance trusts in England have submitted false figures on their 999 response times, thus giving an exaggerated picture of their performance, a government watchdog has found.

The widespread practice of reporting response times quicker than they actually are has been exposed in routine inspections of England's ambulance services, which started in August last year.

But the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI), which plans to publish its findings later this year, said it could not tell whether the errors were the result of deliberate fiddling or the lack of proper systems to record the figures accurately.

Deliberate misreporting of waiting list figures by NHS trusts will be highlighted next week by the Audit Commission after an investigation of waiting lists in 41 trusts. The disclosures raise doubts on the reliability of government claims that the NHS is improving.

Trusts are expected to respond within eight minutes to at least 75 per cent of life-threatening calls. The latest league tables for 2001-02, published in July last year, showed only four out of 32 trusts missed that target.

But the figures are now in doubt after the inspections by CHI at 28 of the 32 ambulance trusts in England. CHI expects to complete the remainder, which include the London Ambulance Service, in the next few months.

A CHI spokesman said: "Since we started reviewing the ambulance trusts we have become concerned about some of the response data but we are not ready to publish it yet. We have concerns about the data from half of the trusts but they are varying levels of concern."