FORMER Staffordshire ambulance boss Roger Thayne will tomorrow throw down a string of challenges to executives now running the service.

Mr Thayne, right, who led the unsuccessful fight to stop the county service merging into a West Midlands regional service three years ago, has submitted five questions to be answered at the monthly meeting of the trust board in Stoke-on-Trent.

One of them contests whether the service has maintained response times to 999 calls and high survival rates of heart attack and stroke casualties; both the best in the UK before the Staffordshire trust was abolished.

Another question challenges the safety of plans to introduce a new computerised dispatch system for sending ambulances to emergency calls.

The third deals with why primary care trusts pay different rates for each 999 call response - ranging from £117 in Birmingham to £350 in Hereford. The others are about the financial accounts of the air ambulance service and whether the system he pioneered of basing ambulances on stand-by points instead of more remote stations would be spread to the rest of the West Midlands.

Mr Thayne, now chairman of Staffordshire probation service, will say in his written questions: "The cost of providing the emergency ambulance service in Staffordshire has risen from £20.9 million to over £25 million when there has been a 25 per cent reduction in productivity.

"Does the board accept the concerns about the merger within the Staffordshire Ambulance board have been proven justified?"

The public is allowed to attend the meeting starting at 10am at the Chamber of Commerce offices at Festival Park, Etruria.