Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his Department has made on the NHS Long Term plan target of increasing clinical trial participation for children and young people with cancer to 50% by 2025.

The Department is committed to maximising our potential to lead the world in clinical trials and ensuring clinical trials are more accessible, including for children and young people. The Department does not hold data on the overall percentage of children and young people with cancer that are enrolled in clinical trials nationwide, but does collect data on participation through National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funded infrastructure.

The Department funds research and research infrastructure through the NIHR. NIHR-funded infrastructure is enabling clinical trial participation for children and young people with cancer. In particular, the NIHR Clinical Research Network, now the NIHR Research Delivery Network, supported 15 cancer studies which children and young people were eligible for between 2021/22 and 2023/24, and across all these studies, 715 total participants were recruited during this timeframe.

Through the NIHR, the Department also jointly funds the Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre Paediatric Cancer Network with Cancer Research UK and the Little Princess Trust, which brings together clinicians and translational scientists to run early phase clinical trials for children and young people with cancer.