Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much funding he has allocated from the public purse to research on (a) cervical cancer and (b) cervical cancer screening in each of the last 12 months.

The Department invests £1 billion per year in health research through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

NIHR’s cancer research expenditure has risen from £101 million in 2010/11 to £132 million in 2018/19. This constitutes the largest investment in a disease area.

As with other Government funders of health research, the NIHR does not allocate funding for specific disease areas. The level of research spend in a particular area, such as cervical cancer, is driven by factors including scientific potential and the number and scale of successful funding applications.