Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between John Baron and Steve Brine

Tuesday 24th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

16. What steps the Government are taking to ensure that the recommendations of the cancer strategy will be implemented by 2020.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Brine)]

I, too, hope my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Bim Afolami) is okay.

Saying that gave me a crucial few seconds. [Interruption.]

[Steve Brine]

We are very clear that achieving the 62-day standard is not a prerequisite for transformation funding, but the better the performance against the standard, the more funding alliances will receive. Most have now received 75% to 100% of the funding requested. This is taxpayers’ money, so we must ensure alliances are operationally strong and ready to achieve transformation.

[Mr Baron]

I welcome the new Secretary of State to his post.

There remains the inconvenient truth that, despite all Governments bombarding the NHS with process targets in recent decades, cancer survival rates are not catching up with international averages. The last Government’s estimates suggested that that needlessly costs 10,000 lives a year as a result. Will the Minister work with the new Secretary of State, in drawing up the next cancer strategy, to put outcome indicators at the very heart of the process? For example, holding the local NHS accountable for its one-year figures would encourage initiatives to promote earlier diagnosis, cancer’s magic key.

[Steve Brine]

I thank my hon. Friend for his work chairing the all-party group on cancer over many years, as I know he is about to step down. He has two answers in one here. Yes is the answer. Improving cancer patient outcomes will be the seam that runs through the centre of the NHS’s long-term plan, like the proverbial stick of rock.

Cancer Targets

Debate between John Baron and Steve Brine

Tuesday 1st May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Steve Brine]

I will not give way. I remember Mr Streeter’s ruling.

There are eight cancer waiting time standards and, since one in two of us born since 1960 will be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetime, they are an important indicator—to patients, clinicians and politicians and the public—of the quality of cancer diagnosis, treatment and care that NHS organisations provide to millions of our constituents every year. They are a component of the success we have had with survival rates, so it is good that we are discussing them here today. I use the word “target” cautiously, because I have always been clear that standards should not necessarily be targets. If someone has a suspected cancer, 28 days is 28 lifetimes too long—I will talk about the urgent diagnostic centres in a moment. Sometimes we are not trying to get to the maximum, so “target” can be a misleading term.

As has been said, we are currently meeting six of the eight standards. One of those we are not meeting is the 62 days from urgent GP referral for suspected cancer to first treatment, which is important because we want to ensure that patients receive the right treatment quickly, without any unnecessary delays. The standards contribute to cancers being diagnosed earlier—only “contribute to”—and that is crucial to improving our survival rates. However, our rates have historically lagged behind those of some of the best-performing countries in Europe and around the world. That is why we have the cancer strategy; we want to do better. The primary reason for those rates is late diagnosis. Early diagnosis is, indeed, the magic key. My hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay has used that term many times—I have heard him use it at the Britain Against Cancer conference—and he is absolutely spot on.

Going back to the 62-day standard and the recovery thereof, my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay will know that due to factors such as an ageing population and the increase in obesity, which we have touched on, the incidence of cancer is increasing. The NHS is treating more patients for cancer than ever before. It is testament to the hard work of NHS staff across all four nations of our United Kingdom that we are treating more people, and do so with the care and compassion for which we know the NHS is world-renowned. However, those numbers are making the achievement of the 62-day standard challenging. To be perfectly honest, the standard has not been met since December 2015 and, although we do not yet have the figures for March 2018, it is unlikely to have been met in 2017-18 either. However, we remain committed to the standard and want to see it recovered. That is why, through this year’s mandate from the Secretary of State to NHS England, we have agreed that the standard will be achieved in 2018-19, while we maintain performance against other waiting time standards.

[Mr Baron]

Will the Minister give way?

[Steve Brine]

I will very quickly. I know that my hon. Friend wants me to come on to the funding.

[Mr Baron]

The Minister will be aware that about a quarter of all cancers are first detected as late as at an emergency procedure. What I would like him to do in the few minutes he has left is to focus on the need to break the 62-day target link with the transformation funding because it is unfair, penalising as it does those cancer services that need help most. Will he consider that?

[Steve Brine]

That is exactly what I was coming on to. I know that my hon. Friend has expressed concern, to put it mildly, about the methods used to allocate funding for the alliances in 2017-18, and in last December’s report by the all-party parliamentary group on cancer it was clear that the alliances should not be linked to achieving the 62-day target. I am aware that my hon. Friend has met with the Prime Minister to discuss the issue and I will reiterate what I am sure she will have told him. Achievement of the 62-day standard is not a prerequisite for funding. Instead, it provides a basis on which NHS England and NHS Improvement, along with senior clinical advice, can assess an alliance’s readiness to transform services.

The alliances are an important mechanism for us in improving performance on the 62-day standard from urgent referral to treatment. They bring together clinicians from primary and secondary care, ensuring collective responsibility for the multidisciplinary teams and the services that they provide, and enabling the leadership that is crucial to the transformation of services. But the bottom line is that it is taxpayers’ money that is being allocated, and it is right and proper that alliances can demonstrate their preparedness for the funding. In 2018-19, NHS England has modified how it will fund alliances, and I can confirm that all alliances will receive transformation funding to support earlier diagnosis and better quality of life for patients.

The national support fund is a genuinely new approach to distributing funding that we have introduced in 2018-19, within the £200 million over two years funding envelope announced in 2017-18. That was in no small part in response to advocacy by my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay, and I pay great credit to him and to others for their work on the link—but not the pre-requisite—that was introduced in 2017-18 between transformation funding and 62-day performance.

The fund has a number of purposes. NHS England uses it to help iron out significant variations between alliances in the amount of funding for which they originally bid. The money will be used to support alliance activity to improve 62-day performance, as well as to enable all alliances to deliver priorities, such as accelerated pathways for lung, colorectal and prostate cancer, and other innovations, such as those we heard from the hon. Member for Scunthorpe, which are included in the 2018-19 CCG planning guidance. The Secretary of State, NHS England’s national cancer director, Cally Palmer, and I all agree that the link to the 62-day standard is the right approach and the right thing for patients. I hope that that clears the matter up, even if it does not go all the way towards satisfying Members.

Although I accept that there is anxiety in some quarters about the link between the performance and the funding, I and the Government are of the view that retaining the link is in the very best interests of patients. Ultimately, they must be our primary focus, and this is public money. We will keep the matter under review. I thank my hon. Friend for his advocacy on the subject.

By the end of the cancer programme, we want to have improved survival and provided equity of access to the highest standards of modern care across all our constituencies in England. As the cancer Minister, I seldom sleep and when I am not sleeping I think very little about anything else, because we are focused on meeting the recommendations in the cancer strategy and doing better for all our constituents—those who are here, those who will live with cancer, those who are living with it now, and those who have passed, who we all know. We are on our way to realising the transformation in services that we all want to see, to make our NHS the world leader in the treatment of cancer that I know it can be.