Ovarian Cancer

Steve Brine Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow such a powerful speech. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew). We have worked together before, and he is getting quite a reputation for calling good debates in this place. I pay tribute to him for bringing this issue before us.

Like my hon. Friend, I come to the House with many experiences, which have shaped my life thus far. Cancer—not just ovarian cancer—has touched my life many times, and I have fought it many times. So far, it has won more times than I have, and such experiences shape the work that I do in the House.

In the next few minutes, I will not rehearse the arguments we have heard or repeat the statistics that my hon. Friend set out, but I will reinforce some of the things that have been said. Clearly, the most effective way of promoting awareness and understanding of the symptoms of ovarian cancer is to raise its public profile, and I hope that this debate will, if nothing else, go some way towards doing that.

I am a member of the all-party group and I pay great tribute to Target Ovarian Cancer and cancer charities generally, which do such an excellent job on this issue. I, too, have been struck by how effective they are as a lobby and by how powerful they are; the fact that so many Members are here today and that so many are interested in this issue is testament to that.

I thought that I would give Members a few reflections on my role as co-chair of the all-party group on breast cancer. I hope that is not insensitive; it is meant to be helpful, because there are really powerful lessons to be learned from the fight against breast cancer, and I hope that they can help women with ovarian cancer.

Thirty years ago, the breast cancer survival rate in this country was barely 50%; today, it is more than 80%. My goodness, that is testament to the effort that has been made. There have been many debates in the House, which have played a tiny role. There has also been funding, and large amounts of research and expertise have been applied to the issue. Awareness, too, has been critical. Similarly, there have been new treatments and a screening programme. All those things have made a difference, and they have all been essential to the significant progress we have achieved.

What has been key, however, has been the number of women who have been prepared to stand up and put their personal experiences on the record to keep breast cancer high on the nation’s agenda. Obviously, there have also been some high-profile deaths. There are so many to list, but what struck me, and it is often quoted, was when Linda McCartney lost her fight against the disease. So many women had grown up with the McCartneys, and her death did so much to place breast cancer on the agenda.

Breast cancer ambassadors continue to play a crucial role in raising awareness by sharing their personal experiences and promoting cancer campaigns in their local areas, as well as nationally, through the national media and through this place. That really brings home issues of which people might otherwise have remained unaware. It was not always the case that women immediately thought a lump might mean breast cancer; that was due to a huge amount of hard work and a huge number of awareness campaigns. The ambassadors really filled the gap effectively, and I hope we can see more of that in the fight against ovarian cancer.

As a member of the all-party group on ovarian cancer, I know that some representatives of the charities might be thinking that the lack of survivors makes fighting this disease more difficult, but that is a reason to try harder, not to give up. The lack of survivors means that people such as the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and other Members who take part in debates such as this are more important than ever in raising the issue and in keeping it high on the political agenda, and we will raise it again and again.

The high number of fundraising and public awareness drives promoted by the Department that the Minister represents, as well as politicians’ willingness seriously to grapple with the issue, have meant that the fight against breast cancer has retained its high profile, to the benefit of tens of thousands of women and their friends and families. Governments have produced very effective awareness campaigns over the years to encourage women regularly to check themselves and to ensure they know what they are looking for. The TLC—touch, look, check—campaign by Breakthrough Breast Cancer, which Target Ovarian Cancer works closely with, has been incredibly effective, and TLC day is part of breast cancer awareness month, which is this month. That is another exceptionally powerful way of reminding the public of that issue and of raising awareness of the fight against breast cancer.

Such simple messages, which can be spread through the champions I mentioned, can be used successfully and powerfully in the fight against ovarian cancer. We can send a bold message that women can fight the disease and beat it, and the hon. Member for Slough is wonderful living proof of that.

Many large national studies with large research grants were carried out in years gone by in the fight against breast cancer, and we need greater commitment and funding for research grants from the Government and charitable bodies at national level in fighting ovarian cancer. By demonstrating the commitment that exists in the research community to provide the wherewithal for large studies, huge strides can be made in bringing ovarian cancer to political and public attention. Perhaps the Minister can shed some light on his Department’s proposals on the future funding and commissioning of studies on the disease. Any information that he can share with us would be much appreciated.

Notwithstanding the connection between the familial forms of breast and ovarian cancer, which share the same defective genes to some extent, the age profile of the women affected is broadly similar, although, as the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson) rightly said, a striking number of younger women are affected by ovarian cancer. In that respect, I received the briefing from the Teenage Cancer Trust, which was very powerful.

It is not inconceivable that the same women who take on board the messaging about breast cancer symptoms will be open to messaging about ovarian cancer. We are always told, so it must be true, that women are much more receptive to health messages than men. That is absolutely right, so we have an important opportunity to make significant and potentially life-saving progress.

Obviously, there are still huge improvements to make in the fight against breast cancer, and that is even truer of the fight against ovarian cancer—particularly in terms of diagnosis and treatment. Like other Members, I urge the Minister to take action on ovarian cancer awareness as soon as possible. Currently, we are barely getting past first base. This is a silent killer, but it is also a silent national scandal. If we achieved what has been achieved in the fight against breast cancer in the past couple of decades through raising awareness, screening and better treatments, 3,000 of the 4,000 deaths a year from ovarian cancer might not occur. That might have saved the grandmother of my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey, and it might have saved mine.

I ask the Minister please to ensure that the Government take swift action and make a start on dealing with this issue. At the moment, there is little DOH-led activity to improve awareness of symptoms among women and GPs, despite the fact that the Government have rightly committed themselves to saving the lives of 5,000 cancer sufferers a year as part of their excellent cancer strategy. I have worked closely with the Minister on the Health and Social Care Bill, and he knows that I am a huge supporter of that cancer strategy. With investment of £12 million in awareness work towards achieving that pledge, some might describe tackling ovarian cancer as low-hanging fruit.

The Minister said earlier in the year that the main focus for the Government’s national symptoms awareness campaign would be bowel cancer, but he also stated that new campaigns were being piloted on other cancers and their symptoms. I hope that he will update hon. Members on the progress that his Department has made in piloting the campaigns. Including ovarian cancer in the awareness budget will help the Government to meet their targets—I am sure of that—while enabling them to improve survival rates for those with ovarian cancer, which are among the worst in Europe at the moment. If they improve, the lives of many women can be saved.

Target Ovarian Cancer gave me an excellent booklet, “An MP’s guide to ovarian cancer”, shortly after I was elected, and it contains a lovely quotation from a lady whom I met at an ovarian cancer reception last year. Her name is Eilish Colclough—I always get it wrong when I attempt it—and she is a mother of five. We have seen her speak before, and she is fighting terminal ovarian cancer. She says:

“I look at myself as living not dying.”

Whenever she speaks, and whenever such patients, survivors, fighters and livers come to speak to the all-party groups that I am involved in, it is always infinitely more powerful than any Member or Minister. In my experience—and I have had a lot of it, as I have said—people with cancer are not just their cancer; they are everything else as well. I hope that we can find many more people such as Eilish—survivors—to give more proof of that, to help us fight ovarian cancer, and to drive down the number of women we lose to it.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—