Brain Tumours in Children

Gerald Howarth Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2013 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anna Soubry)]

It is a pleasure, as ever, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sheridan. I have been called some bizarre things today. I was called “very libertarian” in a debate in this Chamber this morning, and I have been called something else this afternoon. I think it is a compliment, but in any event I will take it as such.

I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) on securing this important debate. As I have said on many occasions, the clock is always against us. I look around and I see the faces of Members who have been engaged not just in similar debates but, most importantly, in some of the meetings and in the all-party group on brain tumours, with which we have all been involved for some time.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod). She and I had a very good meeting with some of her constituents on brain tumours in adults, and many of the problems of diagnosis are also experienced by adults who suffer from this unpleasant, horrible and often fatal disease. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) and Trudy’s Trust. Some of us were at the launch of Trudy’s Trust with Mr Speaker.

I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris) and the Danny Green Fund. We hear today of yet another tragedy that has occurred, but some good comes out of every evil. One of the good things that comes out, especially when a child dies from a brain tumour, is the great power of a family to leave a legacy and make a great tribute to that child. There is nothing worse than the loss of a child—it is every parent’s nightmare—but to be able to turn that awful situation into something good, and to use that power to great effect, is something that we see in many instances. Today we have heard about just some of them, and there are others.

[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) on securing this debate, because HeadSmart is based in my constituency. Will my hon. Friend, the Minister pay tribute to Neil and Angela Dickson? Their daughter Samantha died of a brain tumour and they have done fantastic work, not only to produce the kind of initiatives that have been mentioned by several hon. Members today, but to raise funds that have contributed to research that has produced results that have enabled the causes of brain tumours to be identified in part. Neil and Angela Dickson deserve many congratulations on what they have achieved.

[Anna Soubry]

I am more than happy to add my grateful thanks for the work of Neil and Angela Dickson, and the work of all those who support them. There are many such examples, and funds are often raised for research and to support families or other bits of work.

As my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) said, money that goes into research often has the most powerful results. I pay tribute to Headcase cancer trust in my constituency, as I am very much aware of the great work that continues to be needed on brain cancer, which is a pernicious and horrible disease that affects people of all ages, but it seems somehow to be particularly cruel and wicked when it is inflicted on children.

There are a few things that I want to mention before moving on to some of the substantive points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton. We recognise that we need to do more to bring cancer survival rates up to the level of the best in the world—survival rates have been languishing in the wrong place for too long—so we have an outcome strategy that sets out our ambition to halve the gap between England’s survival rates and those of the best in Europe through saving an additional 5,000 lives every year by 2014-15. We know that the earlier a cancer is diagnosed, the greater the scope for curative treatment, and our strategy therefore prioritises addressing late diagnosis. To support that, we have £450 million over four years going into early diagnosis, which is part of the £750 million of additional funding from the Government for addressing cancer over the spending period. That funding will do much great work that I am happy to identify in a letter to my hon. Friend.

On direct GP access to diagnostic tests, my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) made a good point about having someone within each clinical commissioning group who knows about not only brain cancers and brain tumours but other similar afflictions. As he rightly identifies, when a child has a headache, or when an adult has some other complaint and they are not sure what it is, there could be a more specialist GP who can say, “Maybe this is the sort of case that we need to scan swiftly,” or, “Maybe it needs some other treatment.” That is a very good point, but we need GPs to recognise symptoms that could be indicative of cancer and, where appropriate, to refer patients to more specialist care.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has published referral guidelines for suspected cancers, including a section on children, to help GPs and primary care professionals identify children with suspected cancer. The Department of Health published guidance in April 2012 on the best practice for what we call “referral pathways” for GPs.

When GPs suspect a brain tumour, they are able urgently to refer patients for special care using the two-week urgent referral pathway, and I have been helpfully supplied with some figures that I hope will give comfort and encouragement. Some 95.5% of patients were seen by a specialist within two weeks of an urgent GP referral for suspected cancer—that is for all cancers—in the first quarter of 2013-14, and 96.4% of patients urgently referred by their GP for suspected brain or central nervous system tumours were seen by a specialist within the two-week period. In the first quarter of 2013-14, 96.4% of patients in England urgently referred by their GP for a suspected children’s cancer were seen by a specialist within the two-week period. I think those are good figures, but of course we can always do better.