Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps he has taken to help reduce waiting times for cancer (a) screening and (b) testing in Fylde constituency.

The Government understands that more needs to be done to reduce waiting times for cancer patients, including those in Fylde constituency. To achieve this, we have delivered an extra 40,000 operations, scans, and appointments each week during our first year in Government, as the first step to ensuring early diagnosis and faster treatment.

We will support the National Health Service to transform diagnostic services by spending £1.65 billion on additional capacity, including new surgical hubs and diagnostic scanners, to support the delivery of over 30,000 more procedures and 1.25 million diagnostic tests, as they come online.

In March 2025, performance across Lancashire and South Cumbria, which includes the Fylde constituency, for diagnosing patients within the 28-day standard was 80% against the 75% standard.

NHS England North West is currently the responsible commissioner for the three cancer screening programmes, namely breast, bowel and cervical, for the Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board footprint, which includes the Fylde constituency.

For bowel screening, additional funding has been provided to the Lancashire programme to increase capacity and to support the local population to access colonoscopy, as required.

For breast screening, a full review of all screening sites has been carried out across the region to ensure that they meet the needs of the local population, and the provider programme team meets regularly with system partners to maximise uptake.

NHS England North West has also provided funding for an Improving Uptake Officer post. This role involves working directly with general practices and local community groups to improve uptake, as well as contacting individuals who have not attended their appointment to offer them a new appointment.

For cervical screening, insight work was carried out in 2023 across the North West to understand the reasons why individuals were not coming forward for their cervical screening and to gain views from residents on what would support more people to take up their cervical screening. Using findings from this work, a number of pilot projects are currently being implemented to understand the impact on improving uptake. These include online booking of appointments, training for cervical sample takers to improve patient experience, community champions, and alternative venues for screening.