Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate his Department has made of the amount of money spent on research into childhood cancers in each of the last five years.

The Department funds research into all aspects of human health, including cancer, through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) at the level of £1 billion per year. NIHR cancer research expenditure has risen from £101 million in 2010/11 to £137 million in 2016/17. The Department does not routinely collect data on research expenditure on individual tumour types.

As with other Government funders of health research, the NIHR does not allocate funding for specific disease areas. The level of research spend in a particular area is driven by factors including scientific potential and the number and scale of successful funding applications.