Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking with Cabinet colleagues to provide adequate funding for research into blood cancer (a) treatment and (b) care; and what steps he is taking to help tackle delays in blood cancer diagnosis.

The Department funds research into blood cancer through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). NIHR research expenditure for all cancers was £121.8 million in 2022/23. The NIHR spends more on cancer than any other disease group.

In blood cancer research, the NIHR is funding the £2.6 million PROPEL trial, testing whether a package of enhanced personalised prehabilitation can help people with acute myeloid leukaemia cope better with treatment. The NIHR is also funding a £3 million trial of the drug ibrutinib for treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, and a £2.2 million study to evaluate the digital health platform, AscelusTM, for management of blood disorders, including cancers.

The NIHR welcomes funding applications for research into any aspect of human health, including all cancers. As with other Government funders of health research, the NIHR does not allocate funding for specific disease areas. Applications are subject to peer review and judged in open competition, with awards being made on the basis of the importance of the topic to patients and health and care services, value for money, and scientific quality.

We are committed to improving cancer survival rates and hitting all National Health Service cancer waiting time standards within five years, so no patient waits longer than they should. We will also address the challenges in diagnostic waiting times, providing the number of computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and other tests that are needed to reduce waits.

We are committed to achieving the Faster Diagnosis Standard, which aims to ensure patients have cancer diagnosed or ruled out within 28 days of referral from a general practice (GP) or screening services. We are expanding direct access to diagnostic scans across all GPs, helping to cut waiting times and speeding up a cancer diagnosis or all-clear for patients.

The NHS is implementing non-specific symptom pathways for patients who present with vague and non-specific symptoms, which do not clearly align to a cancer type. This aims to reduce the delays experienced by some patients, and are expected to be of particular benefit to people presenting with signs and symptoms that could be due to blood cancer.