Cancer Outcomes in the UK

Lord Drayson Excerpts

Tuesday 21st April 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Drayson (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, and to contribute to this debate on the National Cancer Plan. I thank my colleague on the Science and Technology Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Patel. I draw the Committee’s attention to my declared interests in the register, and also my 30 years’ experience as a life sciences entrepreneur, covering vaccines, medical devices and, most recently, AI.

The Government’s National Cancer Plan is to be welcomed, as it sets out the ambition for earlier diagnosis, faster access to treatment and more personalised care. However, it does this at a time when the UK’s economic circumstances make the ability to fund this ambition challenging, to say the least. There is a growing appreciation, as a number of noble Lords have already mentioned, that the nation’s health is linked to the nation’s wealth, and cancer survival rates provide a potent measure of both. Increasingly, the public are aware that, as our economy stagnates, our ability to fund the most advanced and effective treatments declines. The rationing of drugs and treatment in hospital corridors are as much a symbol of our failure to create the wealth needed to fund a first-class healthcare system as they are a symbol of dysfunction within the NHS system itself.

The National Cancer Plan is comprehensive in its description of the importance of embracing the potential of modern life sciences, across genomics, AI and robotics, to name just a few. The plan is heavy on aspirational actions, such as:

“Action 3. We will harness AI to speed up lung cancer diagnosis”.


But it is light on details of implementation.

In my opinion, the UK does not have an innovation problem in cancer care, and the plan describes many terrific examples of such innovation in islands of improvement across the country. We have a world-class life sciences industry, but it increasingly struggles to scale. So often, the impact of new technologies such as AI and genomic medicine depends not on scientific potential but on how quickly they are adopted across the NHS as a whole and then embedded into the routine care of patients. Time and again, we make the discoveries but then do not have the will or the money to adopt and benefit from them. So our life science innovators drift abroad or get acquired, and the innovation that should improve patient care and help fund our NHS is lost.

My eldest daughter, hearing that I was giving this speech today, happened to visit the Science Museum yesterday. She is currently doing a post-doc studying the effect of radiation treatments on the brain. She was struck in the current exhibition in the Science Museum by how many innovations UK science has delivered to the world, but how few of them have led to the industrial capacity that generates the wealth to help fund our NHS.

Poor procurement of technology by the NHS is at the heart of the problem. It is a balkanised and fragmented process across the trusts and other groups involved in procurement at both national and local level. It lacks a joined-up approach based on evidence, and it lacks a clear, long-term strategy for procurement that aligns health outcomes with the nation’s economic growth.

There is a shortage of expertise in the NHS in technology adoption and management, in particular of AI, and an overreliance on very expensive management consultants that charge huge fees. Failures in NHS procurement not only undermine the quality of care and waste taxpayers’ money but create a barrier to businesses and investors wishing to invest in UK life sciences. Life is particularly hard for small companies. The unwillingness of NHS trusts to accept evidence from other trusts means that companies spend ages repeatedly doing pilots across multiple trusts, never getting to a critical mass of business in the UK market.

The fact is that the NHS determines the fate of our UK life sciences industry, an industry in which we have had a great track record of science innovation but now lack scale. Just look at the life sciences sector that was listed on the London Stock Exchange 20 years ago compared with the list now. It is a pale shadow of its former self.

Much is said in the cancer plan about how artificial intelligence will have an enormous impact on cancer detection and the discovery of new cancer medicines. However, if the UK does not develop the onshore expertise to create software systems aligned with the values of our NHS and our society, the NHS will have no choice but to continue to buy systems that, like Palantir’s, are closed, cause vendor lock-in and lead to wealth being created elsewhere. We will then continue to import the biases that were embedded in those systems when their AI algorithms were trained on the US healthcare system. Our NHS will become less fair and less aligned with the values of our society, and the wealth created by the AI wave will accrue overseas.

We must scale the innovations in cancer treatment that we know work, ensuring that our pension money is invested at home in innovative British companies that can supply them, and we must invest in the infrastructure needed to support the adoption of these innovations. Only then will we enable our NHS to deliver the high-quality cancer care that people want and help create the wealth needed to pay for it.