Oral Answers to Questions Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateMaggie Throup
Main Page: Maggie Throup (Conservative - Erewash)Department Debates - View all Maggie Throup's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(1 year, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberI pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who has long championed this issue. Indeed, he secured an amendment to the Health and Care Act as part of that campaign. We will be fulfilling our obligation by including an objective on cancer outcomes when we publish the next mandate to NHS England, and I hope he will see that as a welcome step.
To improve cancer waiting times and outcomes, and learning from the success of the covid vaccine roll-out where hard-to-reach cohorts were vaccinated in everyday settings such as shopping centres and football stadiums, will my right hon. Friend look at locating more community diagnostic centres away from formal clinical settings in hospitals and taking them out into the community?
This is an innovative and exciting development, thinking about how we offer services in different ways and bring those services to patients much more locally. The community diagnostic centres are a huge step forward in that, but we should also be looking at our engagement with employers, at how we use more tests at home and at the successes we have had, for example, with some of the screening programmes in order to offer more services closer to patients.
The hon. Gentleman is recycling this question almost as often as he recycles the non-dom funding. As I said at the last Health and Social Care Question Time, it is like the 1p on income tax that the Lib Dems used to promise, which was applied to every scheme going.
We touched on this issue at the last Question Time, and indeed at the one before: we have a commitment to a long-term workforce plan. The Chancellor made that commitment in the autumn statement, but it is a complex piece of work that NHS England is working on. It is important that we get the reforms in that plan right, and that is what we are committed to doing.
We are still committed to reducing the advertising of unhealthy food, including the junk food watershed that will be implemented in 2025. Ahead of that, we are taking action on obesity across the board, including the sugar tax, which has cut the average sugar content of affected drinks by 46%, the calorie labelling that we have on out-of-home food in cafés and restaurants, and the location restrictions on less healthy food that are coming in from October.