Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the implications for his policies of the estimate in Macmillan Cancer Support's report entitled The Forgotten C, published in October 2020 that it could take (a) 20 months to tackle the cancer diagnosis backlog and (b) 17 months to tackle the starting first cancer treatment backlog in England.

The estimates in the Macmillan report, ‘The Forgotten C’ are not recognised by the Department or NHS England and NHS Improvement.

In the latest cancer waiting times data for September 2020, urgent referrals were at more than 100% of 2019 levels, and over 45,000 people received a cancer treatment – 96% of last year’s levels. Across the period from March to September 2020, over 291,000 cancer treatments were carried out - 86% of the level in 2019.

In September 2020, 94.5% of patients with a decision to treat a first treatment of cancer received treatment within 31 days.