Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government whether the 10-Year Cancer Plan for England will ensure that blood cancer patients receive the most optimal treatment, regardless of where they live.

The Government has been clear that there should be a national cancer plan, and we are now in discussions about what form it should take, including how we will ensure that cancer patients across England receive the most optimal treatment. We will develop and publish the 10-Year Health Plan before publishing a new national cancer plan, and will provide updates in due course.

It is a priority for the Government to support the National Health Service to diagnose cancer, including blood cancer, as early and quickly as possible, and to treat it faster, to improve outcomes for all patients across England.

The Department is committing to this by improving waiting times for cancer treatment, starting by delivering an extra 40,000 operations, scans, and appointments each week, to support faster diagnosis and access to treatment. In addition, NHS England has implemented non-specific symptom pathways for patients who present with non-specific symptoms, or combinations thereof, that can indicate several different cancers. This includes leukaemia, which can present non-specific symptoms, such as unexpected weight loss and night sweats. From NHS England’s national evaluation, blood cancers are one of the most common cancer types diagnosed through these pathways.

The Department is committed to implementing the recommendations of Lord O'Shaughnessy’s review into commercial clinical trials, making sure that the United Kingdom leads the world in clinical trials, and ensuring that innovative, lifesaving treatments are accessible to NHS patients, including those with blood cancer.

In September 2024, NHS England announced a new targeted treatment, Quizartinib, to be prescribed to newly diagnosed patients with a specific type of leukaemia, boosting their chance of remission and long-term survival, made available through NHS England’s Cancer Drugs Fund, which fast-tracks new innovative cancer treatments into standard care. This followed a previous announcement in August 2024, announcing the new treatment, Zanubrutini, for those with marginal zone lymphoma, which could halt the progression of their cancer and provide an alternative to further rounds of chemotherapy.