Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to reduce cases of prostate cancer.

The Government understands that more needs to be done to reduce the number of cases of prostate cancer in England.

The Government and the National Health Service promote a healthy lifestyle and physical activity to help reduce the risk of prostate cancer. Guidance on healthy eating, including the United Kingdom’s healthy eating model the Eatwell Guide, is communicated through the NHS.UK website. Alongside this, the NHS’s Better Health Campaign signposts people to digital support like the NHS Active 10 walking app.

My Rt Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has announced that following publication of the 10-Year Health Plan, a National Cancer Plan for England will be published this year. The National Cancer Plan will have patients at its heart and will cover the entirety of the cancer pathway, from referral and diagnosis to treatment and ongoing care, and will apply to all cancer types, including prostate cancer. The goal is to reduce the number of lives lost to cancer over the next 10 years.

Currently, the UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC) does not recommend a national prostate cancer screening programme due to the limitations of the current best test, the Prostate Specific Antigen test, which may lead to overdiagnosis and overtreatment of cancers that would not have caused harm during a man’s lifetime. However, the UK NSC is undertaking a comprehensive evidence review to assess six potential approaches to targeted screening for those at higher risk of developing prostate cancer. Recommendations will be published upon the conclusion of this review.

In addition, the Government has invested £16 million in the £42 million UK-wide TRANSFORM trial, led by Prostate Cancer UK, which aims to identify new ways of detecting prostate cancer at an earlier stage, including in men without symptoms.