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 ensure consistent publication of data on waiting times for (a) leukaemia and (b) other cancer treatments.

Cancer waiting time data is collected by NHS England according to three performance standards: the Faster Diagnosis Standard (FDS), which aims to ensure patients have cancer diagnosed or ruled out within 28 days of referral from a general practice or screening service; the 31-day wait from a decision to treat to first or subsequent treatment of cancer combined standard; and the 62-day referral to first definitive treatment for cancer combined standard.

Data can then be broken down by cancer type. For the FDS, data regarding leukaemia and its sub-types is collected using the following two categories, suspected acute leukaemia and suspected haematological malignancies, excluding acute leukaemia. The latter category includes non-acute leukaemia when there is a suspicion. These statistics are published monthly and are available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/cancer-waiting-times/