My mother suffered from a heart attack in December 2014 and waited 50 minutes for an ambulance to attend, despite the call being correctly classified as 'Red 2'.  In the course of my complaint, I have been horrified to discover that ambulance services in England are "only funded to respond to 75% of Red calls (life-threatening) within 8 minutes". As long as they hit that target, they receive no more funding.  Apparently the other 25% don't matter, even if waiting almost an hour suffering from heart attack, stroke, cardiac arrest or severe bleeding.  People have died because of this policy. Ambulance services should always be adequately funded, even in times of recession. Every single one of us in this country relies on the same emergency ambulances.  We hope we will never need them, but when we do - we should be able to except a better than 3 in 4 chance we will be responded to urgently. 75% is far too low and needs to be increased so that ambulance services receive adequate funding and lives are saved.