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 to improve UK-wide data collection on secondary breast cancer; and how such data is used to inform research, workforce planning, including specialist nurses, and assessments of treatment cost-effectiveness.

The Government recognises the importance of robust, comprehensive data on secondary, or metastatic, breast cancer to improve patient outcomes, inform research, and support effective workforce and service planning.

Through the National Cancer Plan, for the first time, we have committed to delivering the systemic definition, identification, and counting of recurrent and metastatic cancers, starting with metastatic breast cancer, addressing longstanding gaps in national data on secondary disease.

To improve data collection, the National Disease Registration Service’s Get Data Out programme is strengthening the scope, quality, and accessibility of cancer data. This includes expanding the data made available to the public, clinicians, and researchers on incidence, routes to diagnosis, treatments, and survival.

This data is used to support cancer research and outcomes analysis, to inform service and workforce planning, including understanding demand for specialist roles such as breast cancer clinical nurse specialists, and to provide real‑world evidence to support assessments of clinical and cost effectiveness used in commissioning and appraisal processes. NHS England is also taking action to improve the completeness and consistency of data collected by National Health Service trusts. This includes funding national audits for primary and metastatic breast cancer using routinely collected NHS data. These audits assess diagnosis, treatment, and care pathways, identify variation in practice, and highlight areas where data quality or service delivery can be improved.

On 11 September 2025, the second State of the Nation report for primary and metastatic breast cancer was published by the National Cancer Audit Collaborating Centre, and officials in the Department and NHS England are acting on the findings where appropriate, including to strengthen data quality across trusts.