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 contacting women who have not received a breast cancer screening since 2010.

The United Kingdom National Screening Committee has produced reviews on the effectiveness of screening for the following cancers; the breast, bowel, cervical screening programmes are effective. Prostate, lung, ovary, mouth, gastric, and bladder are not recommended as there is not enough evidence to suggest that they are effective. Further information is available at the following link:

https://legacyscreening.phe.org.uk/screening-recommendations.php

Public Health England will contact all the women affected living within the UK who are registered with a general practitioner before the end of May with the first 65,000 letters going out this week.

The breast screening programme was started in 1988 and rolled out over three years. It originally invited women aged 50 to 64. Following pilots in the late 1990s screening was extended for women aged up to 70 between 2001 and 2006 in line with the National Health Service Cancer Plan. The Cancer Reform Strategy (2007) outlined plan to extend the age range of breast screening to offer screening to all women aged 47-73 years in England from 2012. However, to gather as much evidence as possible on screening the extended age ranges, the decision was taken for the extension to become a randomised controlled trial (AgeX). Further information is available at the following link:

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/Browsable/DH_4990751