COUNCILLORS in Pendle are stepping up the pressure on ambulance bosses after it was revealed crews failed to reach nearly 100 emergency cases this year within eight minutes in West Craven.

Campaigners in Barnoldswick and Earby called for emergency response times to be catalogued for the BB18 postcode area, amid concerns about response times for ‘blue-light’ patients.

And it has emerged that only around half of ‘high priority’ calls are being administered within an eight-minute benchmark.

One councillor told the West Craven area committee that he had even seen ambulances coming from Settle and North Yorkshire to deal with West Craven call-outs.

Coun Ken Hartley, who called for further research on the number of cross-border cases dealt with in the district, said: “The response times are just not good enough.”

Coun David Whipp, committee chairman, said the results were “woefully inadequate.”

The situation reached a peak in March when only 43.86 per cent of the high priority call-outs were reached within eight minutes – leaving 32 cases to wait longer.

Now Coun Lindsay Gaskell, who represents Coates ward, has drawn up a motion to be presented to Pendle Council on Tuesday, asking for urgent action to be taken. She said: “It’s alarming that tens of thousands of residents and workers who come to Barnoldswick on a daily basis get such a poor service when we have an ambulance station in the town.”

In the last six months there have been 171 occasions when the North West Ambulance Service failed to meet the eight-minute target for West Craven.

Coun Gaskell’s motion calls on NWAS to improve the service for West Craven and for the borough council chief executive to write to the service, expressing the authority’s concerns.

NWAS is expected to attend 75 per cent of high priority cases within eight minutes and is achieving the target on a Lancashire-wide basis.

The ambulance station recently relocated to combined premises with the county constabulary in Fernlea Avenue.

On Saturday the Lancashire Telegraph reported that NWAS had been criticised for failing to reach a new benchmark for the most critical of emergency calls. The trust however said it had reached Government targets for category A calls and was now reaching the new benchmark targets.