Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure women receive timely breast cancer screenings.

The Department recognises the importance of timely breast screening, to support this we has invested £10 million for breast screening units to deliver 28 new breast screening units and nearly 60 life-saving upgrades to services, so more women can be checked for signs of cancer, speeding up diagnosis and treatment. We are restoring the NHS Breast Screening programme to pre-pandemic levels continues. The majority of services removed their backlogs of invitations by the end of December 2022, with the remaining services being monitored and supported nationally and regionally. In addition, steps are being taken to remove barriers to attending breast cancer screening such as promoting the use of text message alerts to remind women of upcoming appointments and the roll out local and national media campaigns.