Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to improve UK-wide data collection on secondary breast cancer; and how such data is used to inform research, workforce planning, including specialist nurses, and assessments of treatment cost-effectiveness.

Answered by Sharon Hodgson - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

The Government recognises the importance of robust, comprehensive data on secondary, or metastatic, breast cancer to improve patient outcomes, inform research, and support effective workforce and service planning.

Through the National Cancer Plan, for the first time, we have committed to delivering the systemic definition, identification, and counting of recurrent and metastatic cancers, starting with metastatic breast cancer, addressing longstanding gaps in national data on secondary disease.

To improve data collection, the National Disease Registration Service’s Get Data Out programme is strengthening the scope, quality, and accessibility of cancer data. This includes expanding the data made available to the public, clinicians, and researchers on incidence, routes to diagnosis, treatments, and survival.

This data is used to support cancer research and outcomes analysis, to inform service and workforce planning, including understanding demand for specialist roles such as breast cancer clinical nurse specialists, and to provide real‑world evidence to support assessments of clinical and cost effectiveness used in commissioning and appraisal processes. NHS England is also taking action to improve the completeness and consistency of data collected by National Health Service trusts. This includes funding national audits for primary and metastatic breast cancer using routinely collected NHS data. These audits assess diagnosis, treatment, and care pathways, identify variation in practice, and highlight areas where data quality or service delivery can be improved.

On 11 September 2025, the second State of the Nation report for primary and metastatic breast cancer was published by the National Cancer Audit Collaborating Centre, and officials in the Department and NHS England are acting on the findings where appropriate, including to strengthen data quality across trusts.

Question to the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero:

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of wholesale electricity prices being set by the marginal cost of gas generation on the extent to which consumer bills reflect lower-cost renewable generation.

Answered by Michael Shanks - Minister of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)

Marginal pricing incentivises the cheapest sources of energy production to provide as much power as possible, more expensive producers are only used when it is necessary to meet demand.

The real problem is that we rely too much on volatile fossil fuels – and the solution is our clean power mission: upgrading our grid while accelerating the rollout of clean, homegrown energy, so the price of electricity is instead set by clean power that we control.

Every wind turbine we switch on and solar panel we deploy helps reduce our exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets.

Found: Letter dated 14/04/2026 from Pat McFadden MP to Ann Davies MP and Gill German MP regarding two ministerial