Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government is taking to encourage more women to attend cervical screening.

Public Health England is working to raise awareness of this disease and encourage women to attend cervical screening through the national ‘Be Clear on Cancer’ campaigns, which have been run in partnership with Cancer Research UK since 2011.

PHE is in the process of developing a new campaign that will promote the uptake of cervical screening. The campaign is scheduled to launch early in March.

NHS England is also investing in initiatives to help ensure equality of access to screening and is investing more than £258 million this year to improve access to general practice and more than half the country is benefitting from improved access to all routine appointments (including cervical screening), at evening and/or weekends.