Lobular Breast Cancer

Helen Morgan Excerpts

Tuesday 10th December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Vaz. I thank the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) for bringing this really important debate to the Chamber and for her excellent speech, which told the story of her friend Heather and the stories of Katy, Emma, Kirstin and Cressida, who have suffered a pernicious type of disease that we are currently unable to treat effectively 100% of the time.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones), the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis), the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), and my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (John Milne) for their speeches, which were all excellent. I also thank the hon. Members for Maidstone and Malling (Helen Grant) and for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) for sharing their own stories, which were very helpful to the discussion. I thank Dr Susan Michaelis for the bare-root rose—when we received it in the MPs’ offices, we were all a bit stumped by what the enormous box might be for—and, more importantly, for her tireless campaigning to secure funding for research into lobular breast cancer.

The speeches today have been excellent and detailed, and I wish to avoid repetition. As we have heard, 22 people a day in the UK—mostly women—and 1,000 women globally are diagnosed with invasive lobular breast cancer. It is the second most common type of breast cancer, so it is really important that we support the Lobular Moon Shot Project. Liberal Democrats will fully support that project, which is run with the Manchester Breast Centre. Some £20 million over five years to better understand the diagnosis and treatment of this disease is not really a significant investment for the Government, but it would have an enormous and meaningful impact for those people—mostly women, but, as I said, there are some men—who are affected by it every single day.

Research funding is such an important part of investment in the early detection and treatment of cancer—particularly for lobular breast cancer—which is better for everyone, including the patients who have been diagnosed. Receiving a diagnosis of any type of cancer is a really difficult moment for any individual and their family, but receiving a diagnosis of a cancer for which there is not a clear treatment pathway is even more concerning. It is really important that we try to address the problem that these women face. It is better for them and for the NHS, because, as we all know, early treatment tends to be more successful and quicker. Because of that, it is also better for the taxpayer. It is entirely consistent with the recently announced Government strategy of rewiring the NHS to focus resources on early prevention, detection and treatment to ensure that people are kept healthy, rather than treated when they are sick.

As other speakers have pointed out, this disease is the sixth most common cancer in women, and it needs to be treated as a distinct disease. We must ensure that women who face this diagnosis are given the treatment for the disease that they have, not for one that they do not have. It is really important that that is built into the Government’s new cancer strategy, which they have committed to work on. The last Government did not have a 10-year cancer plan, although they did include lobular breast cancer in their women’s health strategy, so I was really pleased to see that in a debate led by my hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham, this Government committed to a national cancer strategy. That is a really important step forward, and we are really pleased that the Government felt able to make that step. I hope that for people who have been diagnosed with lobular breast cancer and, indeed, any other type of cancer that the Government are able to deliver on the strategy as soon as possible.

One of my key concerns is the dreadful waiting times for scans and for results from MRI scans, which are the best way of detecting lobular breast cancer, and other types of CT scan. In my constituency of North Shropshire, which is part of the Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin integrated care board, we have some of the worst records in the country for scan interpretation. As a result, I have been contacted by constituents who have had devastating outcomes, where scan results have been delivered to them, only for them to find out that they have been on the wrong type of treatment in the meantime, sometimes for many months. We need to avoid that happening in the future. The leadership team has shown that it can address the problem, and I am pleased to report that it is beginning to do so in Shropshire.

I hope that the cancer strategy will identify where there are shortages of radiologists and of the machinery needed to carry out those scans and to ensure that we hit the 62-day waiting-time target for people who need to start urgent cancer treatment. Part of the capital expenditure plan announced by the Government is critical to that, and I look forward to hearing the details from the Minister.

The Liberal Democrats also want the Government to pass a cancer survival research Act that requires the Government to co-ordinate and ensure funding for less survivable and less common types of cancer, and for types of cancer that are not currently treated as distinct or treated appropriately. We want the time it takes for new treatments to reach patients to be halved, which would mean expanding the capacity of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. That would ensure that patients with cancers that do not respond to current standard treatments can access new treatments much more quickly as they come online.

I echo the request of the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood and the other hon. Members who have spoken so powerfully today. The Lobular Moon Shot Project would change the lives of 8,500 women in the UK every year. In developing the national cancer strategy, I hope the Minister will consider some of the proposals that we have put forward collectively today, which are aimed at improving detection, treatment and survival rates for people with invasive lobular cancer and all other types of cancer.