Hancock on spot over Dunn’s long wait

CONCERNS ABOUT the length of time it took paramedics to reach teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn have been raised with the Health Secretary.

It took ambulance crews 43 minutes to get to the 19-year-old, despite him breaking “every major bone” in a crash with a car outside a US military base in Northamptonshire last August.

The 19-year-old’s stepfather Bruce Charles, and his stepbrother Ciaran, had a “brief ” 11-minute meeting with Matt Hancock yesterday to talk about issues which they believe led to the delay.

The suspect in the case, Anne Sacoolas, 42, the wife of a US intelligence official based at RAF Croughton, was granted diplomatic immunity following the crash and was able to return to her home country, sparking an international controversy.

Speaking outside the Department for Health and Social Care, family spokesman Radd Seiger said their meeting with Mr Hancock was “very brief” as “he is clearly under an awful lot of pressure”.

He said: “There are two things we discussed, the most important of which is, we need to find a long-term funding solution to social care in the community.

“Because one of the main reasons why the ambulance was late to Harry that night was bedblocking, and the ambulances stack up in the car parks and there wasn’t an ambulance anywhere near Harry that night.

“The second issue is using the NHS appropriately, because if people are using 999 and sending ambulances to places where they shouldn’t be, what happens is people like Harry end up where he was with no ambulance nearby.” Mr Seiger stressed that the family had no criticism of the ambulance service, adding that both the frontline and behind-thescenes staff were all “heroes”.