Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to increase cervical cancer screening uptakes among women in the 25 to 29 age group.

A range of work is being undertaken by Public Health England (PHE) to understand the reasons for the decline in uptake and to support the National Health Service and local authorities to address them. They include access to timely and useful data for benchmarking, evidence on best practices to increase uptake among women who wish to be screened, using governance levers to advice NHS and local authorities and working in partnership with commissioners, providers and charities.

NHS England closely monitors the coverage rates for cervical screening in all age groups. Local NHS England commissioners analyse coverage rates within their area and work with general practices to improve coverage by sharing best practice. Work done to increase uptake includes sharing and implementing best practice such as cervical screening guides for general practitioner (GP) practices or targeting practices with low coverage rates, where relevant this includes working to retain delivery via the genitourinary medicine clinics, further roll out of GP-endorsed text reminder services, and supporting non NHS England research project for self-testing pilot for cervical screening.

At a national level, NHS England is working with PHE to make evidence-based improvements such as improving invitation letters to patients to encourage more to attend their cervical screening appointment.

NHS England is working in partnership with Cancer Research UK and Macmillan Cancer Support on the Accelerate, Coordinate, Evaluate (ACE) Programme aiming to generate knowledge about effective approaches to achieve earlier diagnosis. A number of ACE test sites are evaluating approaches to increase screening rates in a range of groups, including black and ethnic minority women, women with learning disabilities and women from disadvantaged backgrounds.