I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision for the purposes of increasing uptake of NHS Breast Screening Programme appointments, including in groups currently less likely to take up such appointments; to extend eligibility to that programme to persons at an increased risk of breast cancer because of their family history; and for connected purposes.
Last weekend saw Mothering Sunday, and for many of our constituents that meant a time to catch up with Mum and maybe have lunch, go for a walk or buy some flowers. My little ones did that for my wife. For some, however, Sunday was not a day for lunch, or a walk, or a catch-up; there were flowers, but they were dropped off at the churchyard or the crematorium, as they are every year, and that group included me, as it has for the past 19 years. I was in my late 20s, away on my stag do in Wales, when I got a phone call very early in the morning to say I needed to get home. My mother was in hospital at that point, with only one possible outcome. She passed away a few days later, five weeks before Susie and I got married. She was just 52 years old.
People say that events and our life before we enter this place shape how we approach some of our time here, and they are right. Colleagues here and constituents in Winchester and Chandler’s Ford know that breast cancer is an issue I am passionate about, and now they know why. For my first five years as an MP, I co-chaired the all-party group on breast cancer; then, in 2017, it was the privilege of my life to serve as the Cancer Minister. We said then, as we do now, that for cancer early diagnosis can be game-changing—cancer’s “magic key”, as it is often put.
Breast cancer is incredibly treatable if it is detected early: 98% of women who have the disease detected at stage 1 survive for at least five years after their diagnosis, and many go on to lead full lives. It is true that we have made huge progress on tackling cancer—indeed, survival rates have been increasing year on year for the past decade or more and have doubled in the last 40 years in the UK, thanks in large part to more cases being caught early. Our NHS breast screening programme is estimated to prevent 1,300 breast cancer deaths every year across the UK—but we need to go further. That is even more true today than it was pre-pandemic, given that, according to figures on NHS England’s latest cancer waiting times, there are nearly 9,000 women in England living with undiagnosed breast cancer due to the impact of covid. The pandemic has, to put it mildly, not helped our efforts to detect breast cancer earlier through screening.
I want to put on the record my thanks to the staff at Hampshire Hospitals and in breast screening centres across the UK. They have worked and continue to work tirelessly to pool and expand capacity so that catch-up appointments can be offered to women who were not screened while the programme was paused. Despite all the hard work, between April 2020 and March 2021, about 936,000 fewer women in England were screened for breast cancer compared with the previous year. Routine breast screening appointments were suspended in March 2020—a mistake we must never repeat—and restarted in the summer of that year, but we are far from fully recovered. The latest breast screening performance data for England shows that the percentage of women taking up their screening invitation within six months has reached an historic low of 62%—well below the national minimum standard of 70%. My fear is that this will be another terrible legacy of the pandemic, even after all the delayed screening invitations have been sent.