Accessibility of Radiotherapy

Alex Easton Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron]

My hon. Friend makes a great point and does a great service to his community by standing up for those groups who support people after cancer, and their families. I know that personally in my own family, so I congratulate him on making a really important point.

My second ask—the Minister should be delighted to hear that I only have two—is that he separately meets with the all-party group on radiotherapy and the leading fantastic clinicians who support us, to look at how the Government and NHS England can turn the tide on radiotherapy nationwide, because the problems of access do not just affect Westmorland; they affect the whole country.

Although in Westmorland our issue is unacceptable distance from services, the problem across the country is that we lack sufficient capacity, lack up-to-date technology, and lack an effective workforce plan. Britain is behind our neighbours on the number of radiotherapy machines, and we are behind our neighbours in how advanced that machinery is. In France, for example, there are twice as many linear accelerators per head as we have in the United Kingdom. Across the OECD, roughly 9% of cancer budgets are spent on radiotherapy; in the UK we spend a paltry 5%. One in two of us will have cancer at some point, and one in two people with cancer should have radiotherapy—to be precise, 53% of us should—yet only 35% of cancer patients in the UK had radiotherapy as their primary treatment. In fact, the regional variation in access to radiotherapy ranges from the lowest of only 29.8%—by the way, that is in my constituency—up to 50%.

There are shocking variations based on tumour type, too. Only 11% of lung cancer patients in some regions receive radiotherapy, compared with 43% in other regions. Only 18% of rectal cancer patients receive radiotherapy in some areas, compared with 62% in others. People’s chances of surviving should not depend on their postcode. Inadequate and inequitable radiotherapy capacity is costing lives. Over the past decade, more than 500,000 patients have waited more than two months for their first cancer treatment. Yet the chilling reality is that for every four weeks of delay in treatment we have a 10% reduction in our chances of surviving.

The Royal College of Radiologists reminds us that in 2024 only 38% of patients starting radiotherapy did so within two months of an urgent referral for cancer. The national target is 85%. Let us compare that with other forms of cancer treatment: 68% of patients had surgery for their cancer in that time, and 64% started chemotherapy within that two months. That means that over 10,000 patients requiring radiotherapy received their treatment after the recommended timeframe. In 2023 some 92% of cancer centres reported delays in patients starting radiotherapy. That is one of the main reasons why the UK is near the bottom of the OECD cancer outcome rankings, which is a sanitised way of saying that people with cancer in Britain are more likely to die sooner than in other equivalent countries. So longer journeys mean shorter lives, and longer waiting times also mean shorter lives.

[Alex Easton (North Down) (Ind)]

Thank you, Sir John, for your chairmanship today. In Northern Ireland, one in two people who need radiotherapy do not get it at an early stage. Does the hon. Member agree that a strong focus on awareness and early diagnosis is needed?

[Tim Farron]

That is a good point. Early diagnosis is vital. We are getting a bit better at it, but it would be a tragedy if we diagnosed people but then did not treat them early enough to cure them. The hon. Gentleman makes a good point on behalf of his communities.

If we cannot cope with treating the number of cancer patients we are seeing now, how will we deal with the projected 30% increase in cancer cases by 2040? The good news—the very, very good news—is that it does not need to be this way. The upcoming cancer plan, of which we have heard an outline today, is an opportunity to supercharge cancer services and transform a culture of normalising unacceptable delays into one that drives continuous cancer care improvements. However, without decisive and radical action and leadership, lives will continue to be lost needlessly.