Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the Answer of 20 October 2016 to Question 48238 on cancer: diagnosis, how he plans to allocated the £300 million per year to improve cancer diagnostics in 2016-17.

In September 2015 we committed, in response to the recommendations set out in the Cancer Taskforce report, to provide up to £300 million more per year for diagnostics by 2020/21. The 2016/17 Planning Guidance for Clinical Commissioning Groups advises them to ensure they plan for appropriate diagnostic capacity as one of the nine ‘must dos’.

As part of the commitment to improve access to diagnostics, in 2016/17 NHS England allocated an additional investment of £15 million in a new National Diagnostics Capacity Fund to explore new and innovative ways to deliver diagnostic services, a new 28 Day Faster Diagnosis Standard, which will ensure that all patients are seen and either diagnosed or have their cancer ruled out within 28 days, and Wave 2 of the Accelerate, Coordinate, Evaluate (ACE) programme, testing a new, multi-disciplinary diagnostic centre approach to ensuring patients with vague but concerning symptoms receive a diagnosis as quickly as possible.

We are monitoring progress with access to diagnostics through a range of process measures such as diagnostic activity, referrals on the urgent suspected cancer pathway and waiting times, and through measures such as the proportion of cancers diagnosed at stages 1 and 2 and emergency routes to diagnosis.

We are also evaluating individual programmes such as ACE.