I am grateful to have had the opportunity to secure this important debate on a subject that matters deeply to me in my role as parliamentary champion for the Teenage Cancer Trust, and as an officer of the all-party parliamentary group on cancer in children and young people. It is an issue that matters profoundly to my constituents. In Mansfield, I am contacted regularly by young people, by parents and by families whose lives have been turned upside down by a cancer diagnosis. They write to me not just about treatment but about their wider experience—the fear, the uncertainty, and the disruption to education, work and relationships. They write because they want to be heard, and I hope that tonight the House, and indeed the Government, will listen.
Every few hours in the United Kingdom, a young person hears the words, “You have cancer”. It is mostly blood cancer, including leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma—the most common cancers among children, teenagers and young adults in the UK. The reality is stark: more young people are getting cancer. Rates have risen by a quarter since the early 1990s, and the increase is projected to continue. Cancer remains the leading cause of disease-related death among teenagers and young adults in the UK, but even for those who survive, the impact can be lifelong—physically, emotionally and socially—especially when the right support is not there. This is happening at a time when life is already tough for young people, many of whom are facing economic uncertainty, struggling with mental health issues, and worrying about their futures. A cancer diagnosis compounds all that, often at the most formative stage of life.
I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing forward this issue, which is clearly very important to him—he has illustrated that through his commitment to these debates, which he always gets involved in. I congratulate him on that.
In Northern Ireland, approximately 60 children under the age of 16, and 80 teenagers and young adults between the ages of 16 and 24, are diagnosed with cancer each year. Although these cases are rare and account for only 1% of all diagnoses, they require a highly specialised, family-centred approach. Around 87% of young people survive for at least one year, and 78% survive for five years or more. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that improvements can be made to ensure that our children have the best possible treatment, regardless of where they live? There should be no box for them; they should get treatment wherever they are in the United Kingdom.
This is Teenage and Young Adult Cancer Awareness Month, and it is right that we use this moment to shine a light on a group that is too often overlooked: young people who fall between children’s and adult services, and whose needs are too often not fully recognised. Before 1990, young people with cancer were treated either on children’s wards or alongside much older adults, with very little recognition of their distinct needs. The Teenage Cancer Trust changed that. It pioneered specialist care for 13 to 24-year-olds, creating dedicated units within the NHS that are staffed by expert nurses and youth workers, and which are designed to support not just treatment but the whole person. Today, 28 units across the UK help young people to receive care, alongside others their own age, in environments that protect their independence, dignity and mental health. At that age, cancer is not just a medical condition; it disrupts young people’s education, relationships, identity and plans for the future.
We know that when young people receive age-appropriate care, their experiences and outcomes improve significantly, but only around half of young people with cancer currently benefit from this type of specialist support. One of the most critical issues facing young people with cancer is the speed of diagnosis. Unlike many adult cancers, those affecting young people are often rare and cannot be prevented. Blood cancer, which is the most common cancer for young people, does not have the same focus or understanding as other types of cancers. That means early diagnosis is absolutely crucial, yet too many young people face delays.
Awareness of cancer symptoms among young people remains worryingly low. Fewer than half of 18 to 24-year-olds can identify key warning signs—things like unexplained lumps, pain, tiredness or significant weight changes. In Mansfield, I have heard directly from families about the consequences of that lack of awareness: multiple GP visits, uncertainty and delays before being referred for diagnosis. Indeed, nearly half of young people with cancer report attending three or more GP appointments before being referred. That experience was echoed by the family of 11-year-old Joel from Mansfield, who in 2024 sadly passed away after a nine-month battle with acute myeloid leukaemia. He made four initial GP visits and presented with a range of symptoms, which were dismissed as simply bruising from football or as a laundry detergent allergy. After the symptoms worsened, it took a second opinion from another GP and an emergency A&E visit before the cancer was diagnosed correctly.
In view of the time, I will continue, if my hon. Friend does not mind.
These are not marginal figures. They represent the overwhelming majority, yet despite a clear NHS commitment that every young person should have access to mental health support, provision remains inconsistent. In effect, it is a postcode lottery. Five years ago, the Teenage Cancer Trust warned of that in its “#NotOK” report, but today progress remains limited.
In Mansfield, families have raised with me the difficulty of accessing timely mental health support during and after treatment. The family of Eilidh, a 23-year-old from Mansfield who was diagnosed with a rare lung cancer at the age of 20 after initially being reassured that nothing was wrong, made that point to me. She underwent the removal of an entire lung, but what followed was a lack of clear aftercare and support, with no structured rehabilitation, limited guidance on recovery and ongoing difficulty in navigating care. Her experience highlights not just the physical impact of cancer treatment, but the confusion, anxiety and gaps in support that too many young people face once treatment ends. I ask the Minister what funding and timelines are in place to ensure that every young person with cancer can access specialist psychological support, and not just during treatment but for at least two years afterwards.
The third issue is access to clinical trials. Clinical trials are essential to improving outcomes and developing new treatments, but teenagers and young adults are significantly less likely than other age groups to take part, not because they do not wish to but because the system does not work for them. They are often excluded because of age restrictions: they are too old for paediatric trials and too young for adult trials. They are more likely to have rare cancers, meaning that fewer trials are available. I refer again to Joel from Mansfield: his family asked his doctors about opportunities to participate in a clinical trial, but were told that there were none. Even where trials exist, information can be difficult to find, both for clinicians and for parents.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm) for securing this very important debate, which, as we heard, is taking place during Teenage and Young Adult Cancer Awareness Month. I thank him for his very important work on the all-party parliamentary group on cancer in children and young people, as well as for his role as a parliamentary champion for the Teenage Cancer Trust. I am grateful to him for the invitation he has just made for me to visit a Teenage Cancer Trust unit, which I would be very pleased to accept. I pay tribute to some of the fantastic charities that he and I have both worked with: Teenage Cancer Trust, Young Lives vs Cancer and Children with Cancer UK, to name just a few. They supported us to write the national cancer plan. Now that the plan is published, they will play a vital role in its delivery.
Cancer remains a leading cause of death for young people under the age of fourteen. I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like for those children and young people, who have their whole life ahead of them, to hear the words, “You have cancer,” not to mention those mums and dads who go through the nightmare of seeing their child suffer. It is true that 78% of children with cancer aged between eight and 15 said they were “very well looked after” by the NHS, but I will not be satisfied until that number reaches 100%. There are so many areas where we must do better, particularly when it comes to patient experience. My hon. Friend laid out clearly in his opening remarks what some of those areas are, so I will go through them one at a time.
Thanks to my excellent predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Ashley Dalton), we now have a plan that includes a dedicated chapter on children and young people setting out how the Government will address their unique needs. We will begin to shift the dial on detecting, diagnosing and treating cancers in young people, and we will continue to listen to young people and their families, through our patient experience panel, to ensure that lived experience sits at the heart of everything we do.
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm) on securing this important debate; he has been a champion on this issue since he came to this place. The Minister mentioned patient experience. One issue that has been brought to my attention in my surgeries is that, after the often intensive clinical process of a young person going through a cancer diagnosis, getting treatment and getting through the other side, the period after the all-clear is an intense time of social isolation. Significant mental health support is required to get them back and integrated into school, college or work. Would she be prepared to meet me and young people who have been through that experience to discuss how we can improve the system, so that they can integrate back into normal life as quickly and as efficiently as possible?
I thank my hon. Friend for that important intervention. I will also commit to meeting him and the young people he mentions, perhaps in co-ordination with my visit to the Teenage Cancer Trust. I hope there will be plenty of opportunity to meet young people during that visit. It is a yes to both of those requests.
We heard from the children and young people cancer taskforce how many parents have been forced to cut back on food and other expenses to pay for the travel to treatment. When a child is diagnosed with cancer, their family’s only focus should be on helping them to recover and getting them well, not on whether they can afford the petrol or the bus fare to get to their next appointment. That is why, through the plan, we are investing up to £10 million a year to support families with travel costs. This fund will make the world of difference to parents. It does not matter what someone earns; if their child needs treatment, we will help to get them there.
We are also transforming the experience of care in hospital by making sure that every child and young person with cancer has access to high-quality, age-appropriate psychological support, which my hon. Friends the Members for Mansfield and for Redditch (Chris Bloore) both asked about. That support should be from diagnosis, through treatment and beyond; I will take on board the request of my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield for that support to last up to two years post treatment. He spoke about the importance of early referrals to teenage and young adult multidisciplinary teams, with youth support co-ordinators on hand to help young people to navigate the huge journey they are going to have to go on, with the emotional impact of cancer alongside challenges around education, perhaps fertility and their long-term wellbeing.
The Government are committed to diagnosing cancer in children and young people faster to ensure that they get the treatment and care they need as soon as possible. As my hon. Friend set out in his speech, this speed is of the utmost importance, so we will remove the barriers that stand in the way of timely diagnosis by making sure that young people’s needs are embedded into the design of neighbourhood health services.
10:25 pm
House adjourned.
It is important to recognise that such delays are not just clinical; they are often psychological. Evidence shows that waiting two months or more for a diagnosis significantly increases the likelihood of anxiety and depression. I ask the Minister, how will the Government ensure that teenagers and young adults are not simply funnelled through paediatric diagnostic pathways, but are recognised as a distinct group with distinct needs? What steps will be taken to raise awareness, both among young people and across primary care, of the signs and symptoms of cancer in this particular age group?
The second issue that I want to address is psychological support. A cancer diagnosis at any age is devastating, but for a young person it is often overwhelming. They face fears about survival, about treatment and about their future. Their education is interrupted, their friendships are disrupted and their sense of identity can be shaken. It is deeply concerning. Studies including research from Young Lives vs Cancer, which provides specialist social care support, show that 90% of young people undergoing cancer treatment experience anxiety, 83% report loneliness, 70% experience depression and nearly half experience panic attacks.
The ambition has been clear—50% participation by 2025—but progress has been slow. No young person should miss out on a potentially lifesaving opportunity simply because of their age, so I ask the Minister how the Government will measure and report progress on improving access to clinical trials for young people, and what accountability mechanisms are in place to ensure delivery.
Finally, I want to address the issue of data. Too often, young people with cancer are effectively invisible in the system. Data is not consistently collected, not consistently reported and not always broken down in a way that allows us to understand their experiences. Without good data, it is hard to identify inequalities, we cannot target improvements and we cannot ensure accountability. What steps will the Minister take to improve the collection and publication of age-specific data on cancer outcomes for teenagers and young adults?
To conclude, the issues I have spoken about today matter deeply to my constituents in Mansfield and to the young people facing cancer today across the country. They also matter to the families supporting them, and they matter to all of us who believe that no young person should face this disease without the care and support they deserve. The evidence is clear: when young people receive timely diagnosis, age-appropriate care, access to psychological support and opportunities to participate in clinical trials, their outcomes improve. The Teenage Cancer Trust has shown what is possible, but it cannot do it alone. If we are serious about improving outcomes, the commitments in the national cancer plan must be delivered with urgency, funding and accountability. We need to improve awareness, we need to remove barriers and we must ensure that young people are no longer overlooked or underserved.
I will close with a simple request to the Minister: will she commit, alongside the Secretary of State who promised me personally that he would do so, to visit a Teenage Cancer Trust unit to hear directly from young people to understand their experiences and to see at first hand the difference that specialist age-appropriate care can make? If we truly listen to those young people, we will know exactly what needs to change.
Just before recess, the Minister for Care announced the first 27 of 250 one-stop health shops that will be up and running next year, with 120 planned by the end of this Parliament. These offer a new model of care, as set out in our 10-year plan for health, with better access to specialist support and the safe roll-out of AI.
Many colleagues—not least my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh)—have been pushing the Government for a long time to go further on research, which is why we are making research into improving outcomes for children, especially into kinder and more gentle treatments, a national research priority. The Department will take a more joined-up approach to research priorities using data, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield urged us to do, so that efforts are focused where they can make the greatest difference. We will break down the barriers that prevent young people from accessing clinical trials, particularly those who do not often qualify for paediatric or adult trials, by requiring clinical justifications for age limits, while also strengthening data collection across the cancer pathway.
In the next few months, the Department will establish a reformed national cancer board, once a co-chair has been appointed to oversee and monitor the implementation of our cancer plan. The board will include a dedicated lead for children and young people’s cancer, ensuring that this work is driven forward with clear accountability and focus. They will make sure that we are staying on track. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield will play his part in that too.
The Government believe that all children and young people, no matter their circumstances, deserve support to achieve the very best outcomes in life, but most importantly to live fulfilling and happy lives. Alongside our work on cancer, we are combating the drivers of ill health in children’s lives such as poor diet, damp homes, dirty air and a lack of opportunity. We have abolished the two-child benefit cap, taking half a million children out of destitution, shame and hunger. We have brought in free breakfast clubs and extended free school meals so that kids start school with hungry minds, not hungry bellies. We also introduced the soft drinks industry levy, a warm home discount scheme that reaches millions more, and a generational ban on smoking. Awaab’s law will cut pollution and clean up the air that our children breathe.
This year, I am determined to do everything I can for children and young people with cancer. I have my foot on the accelerator, and I look forward to working closely with my hon. Friend in the months ahead on this work.