A FORMER police driving instructor has stepped in to defend ambulance drivers, following criticism over response times.

Ken Turner, 80, of Deansfield in Cricklade, contacted the Evening Advertiser after reading a report in the paper, which highlighted poor response times of the Wiltshire Ambulance Service.

Mr Turner, who taught advanced driving skills to fellow officers across the county between 1956 and 1963 at the police driving school centre in Devizes, said that ambulance drivers had a difficult task and deserved praise not criticism. He insisted that the situation was not as bad as statistics suggest.

While Government targets say that 75 per cent of 999 emergencies should be answered within eight minutes from the time of the call, recent figures for Wiltshire indicate 66.95 per cent of calls were attended to in that time. In April, the figure was 70.76.

As a result, Wiltshire Ambulance Service fell from a three-star rating to a zero.

But Mr Turner, who left the force in 1973 to work in Wiltshire County Council's Road Safety Unit, said that when he called an ambulance a couple of weeks ago for a neighbour in Cricklade, he was impressed at the response time. "They got here in 11 minutes which is a very good time considering the location," he said.

"I asked the driver where he was when he received the message. He said he came directly from the station in Swindon."

He thought much of the criticism unfair. "It's all very well for someone to sit in their ivory tower at a computer and work out a response time of eight minutes but it's not practical.

Mr Turner said that the biggest cause of late response times was the lack of funding and has called on the Government to inject more cash.

Dennis Lauder, chief executive of Wiltshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust, said he is working to improve the situation.

He said: "There is no doubt that the service has suffered in the past from under investment."