Cancer Treatment (Hansard, 6 June 2000)

§ 1. Mr. David Crausby (Bolton, North-East)
What progress is being made on reducing waiting times for cancer treatment. [122859]

§ The Secretary of State for Health (Mr. Alan Milburn)
In April last year, we introduced a two-week waiting time standard for women referred urgently by their general practitioners with suspected breast cancer. This new high standard of care is being put in place for all other urgent cases of suspected cancer during this year. We will be publishing a national cancer plan in the autumn, which will set out our strategy to ensure all cancer patients benefit from prompt access to high-quality diagnostic and treatment services.

§ Mr. Crausby
I thank my right hon. Friend for that reply, and warmly welcome the increased resources that have been made available for cancer treatment. However, although my constituents receive good cancer services from Royal Bolton hospital, they would benefit enormously from quicker diagnostic care, better oncology services and improved palliative care. The Bolton district is among the most poorly funded areas in the country. 142 Would my right hon. Friend visit the hospital to discuss these important services? He would be made most welcome.

§ Mr. Milburn
My hon. Friend is right. We have put extra resources into the Royal Bolton hospital to replace X-ray equipment for breast cancer screening. My hon. Friend will know too that we put in more than £100,000 extra over the previous financial year to improve waiting times for treatment. However, there is always more that can be done, and I am aware of the problems in my hon. Friend's constituency with regard to cancer survival rates. We must continue working on that problem, by improving treatment, and also by focusing on prevention.
Finally, I should be happy to visit the Royal Bolton hospital when I am in the area, as would any of my ministerial colleagues.

§ Mrs. Marion Roe (Broxbourne)
Cancer is a scourge of modern life, and it is right to concentrate on reducing deaths from that terrible disease. However, should not the Government pay more attention to bringing our outcomes into line with those achieved by our European partners, and less to gimmicks? How would the Secretary of State respond to the remarks made by Dr. Joan Austoker of the Cancer Research Campaign, who said that the two-week rule has led to a waste of resources and of specialists' time?

§ Mr. Milburn
The hon. Lady cannot have her cake and eat it. Like me, she wants response times for people with suspected cancer to be faster. That must be the right objective, as it must be very worrying to be told by a GP that one is suspected of having cancer. The sooner a person in those circumstances can see a specialist, the better the chances of successful treatment. It is right for the Government to make sure that people suspected of having cancer see a specialist in hospital as quickly as possible, and we are making good progress on that.
The hon. Lady mentioned cancer survival rates. She served on the Select Committee on Health and knows from her own experience that the picture in the UK is pretty mixed: in some respects we have better survival rates than our European partners—for example, in connection with cervical cancer—but in others, our survival rates our lower. That is why the Government have made the war on cancer such a top priority. It must be right for us to make sure that cancer treatment is improved, and to achieve a proper focus on prevention—for example, by tackling smoking.

§ Mr. Derek Twigg (Halton)
It is right that the Government should give priority to the treatment of cancer, which should be at the forefront of the war on ill health. Is my right hon. Friend aware that a public health report published this week shows that Halton has the highest incidence in the country of cancer from all causes? It also has the second highest incidence of death from all causes. Those figures are obviously appalling for my constituents, and for those of my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mr. Hall). Will my right hon. Friend examine the figures to which I have referred, and will it be possible for my hon. Friend and me to have a meeting with Ministers to discuss them?

§ Mr. Milburn
I am sure that that will be possible. My hon. Friend will know from his constituency 143 experience that the distribution of cancers across the United Kingdom, and England, is uneven, and that poorer areas tend to have the highest rates of cancer and of coronary heart disease. That is why, when we put extra resources into the national health service to improve cancer treatment, we must ensure that the money goes to the right areas. My hon. Friend will be aware that the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), announced in March a further expansion in the number of cancer specialists—the doctors who work in cancer services. We must increase the numbers of such doctors, just as we must increase the numbers of nurses and of treatments available. That will help us tackle cancer, and the appalling health inequalities that scar our nation.

§ Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire)
My father died of cancer, and my mother is currently a sufferer. Opposition Members welcome every penny that can be spent on cancer, but I am worried that the Government seem to concentrate more on gimmicks, such as reducing the waiting time to see GPs. The head of the World Health Organisation cancer specialist team has said that diagnosing cancer is no problem, and that it is entirely misplaced to claim great credit for having cured it. The same specialist described last year's cancer summit in No. 10 Downing street as a total waste of time, and said that participants would have done better to spend an hour moaning about cancer down at the pub.
Will the Secretary of State please tell the House that yesterday's NHS summit in Downing street was more substantive than that, and that some improvements in the diagnosis and care of cancer may come out of it?

§ Mr. Milburn
It simply is not true to say that getting to see a hospital specialist is not a problem—it is a problem in many parts of the national health service. There have been well reported cases of people who have been told by their general practitioner that they have suspected cancer having to wait for weeks and, in some cases, months on end, to see a specialist. That cannot be right, which is why we have put such a high priority on ensuring that people get to see hospital specialists as quickly as possible.
That is not the be-all and end-all, however, as the hon. Gentleman is aware. We have put a huge amount of new investment into cancer equipment in particular. On 1 January this year, I announced the biggest increase in investment for new cancer equipment that the country has seen. That means that in three or four years' time, our cancer equipment will rival anything that is available in hospitals in comparable countries such as Italy, Germany and France. That is the right thing to do—it is not a gimmick, but getting on with the job of modernising and improving the NHS.