Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Cancer Plan, what progress his Department has made on defining and counting recurrent breast cancers.

Through the National Disease Registration Service’s Get Data Out programme, we will expand the data available to the public and researchers by publishing increased information on incidence, routes to diagnosis, treatments, and survival. We will use the Get Data Out programme to make data on rare cancers more granular, extending the publication of regular data to more individual rare and less common cancers by 2027. We will define and count recurrent cancers, starting with metastatic breast cancer. We will increase specificity of data to help us understand where interventions are needed, and how to make those interventions as effective as possible.

Through these National Cancer Plan actions, we will ensure that every person with secondary breast cancer has faster diagnosis and treatment, access to the latest treatments and technology, and high-quality support throughout their journey, while we work to drive up this country’s cancer survival rates.