Oral Answers to Questions

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to raise this matter. At my party conference I met the same campaigners whom he met at his, and I had a good discussion with them. We all know people who have had the tragedy of having breast cancer, and one can only imagine what it must be like to survive primary breast cancer and recover, only to find out that one has a secondary cancer, and often one that is completely incurable. The campaigners are asking for better information, not least because they want to ensure that we spread best practice to every hospital so that we really do treat people as quickly as possible. I had a conversation with them and relayed it to the Health Secretary. I am very happy to write to the hon. Gentleman about it. Making sure that people get the right diagnosis quickly and that we then use the information to tackle secondary breast cancer is absolutely essential for our country.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

Q4. The Prime Minister recently spoke movingly and shockingly about the life of despair that still lies ahead for too many of our looked-after children. Notwithstanding the vital work that has been done in recent years, will he expand on the reforms that he proposes for these, our most vulnerable citizens?

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who knows a lot about this from the work he did in London when working for the Mayor. I think that there are two areas we need to look at most of all. First, we need to speed up adoption processes. We should be reducing the number of children in care by ensuring that they can find loving family homes. We have made some progress, but frankly we have had set-backs, not least because of some of the judgments in our courts, so we need to get the level of adoption back up again. Secondly, we need to take some of the knowledge from our education reforms and use it to reform social services. For example, we need to see the best graduates going into social work. Frankly, those social services that are failing need to be taken over far more quickly.