Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his department is taking to provide earlier diagnosis for bowel cancer.

The Government is determined to cut waiting times and improve outcomes for all cancers, including bowel cancer. The National Cancer Plan was published on 4 February 2026, which will ensure that three in every four people diagnosed with cancer are either cancer‑free or living well five years after diagnosis.

Early diagnosis is a key priority and the plan commits to develop and deliver more proactive approaches to identifying people at risk of cancer through symptomatic case finding, additional support for general practitioners (GPs), and genomic testing. The Department will continue to support the Gateway C digital training platform, and a new generation of digital support tools will help to flag concerning symptoms or test results to GPs for all cancers. As part of this, NHS England will pilot an incentive which encourages the use of electronic safety netting to increase the number of people who complete checks for bowel cancer.

Further actions to improve early diagnosis of bowel cancer includes rolling out increased faecal immunochemical test sensitivity aimed at catching more cancers earlier. The programme, with lowered threshold and combined with increased uptake, will deliver 17,000 earlier diagnoses by 2035.

The NHS Bowel Cancer screening Programme already offers people aged 50 to 74 years old screening every two years. The programme is undergoing several updates to its standards aimed at improving coverage, accessibility, and early detection. This includes updated performance thresholds, and improved accessibility of bowel cancer screening kits.

The NHS Cancer Programme commissioned the Royal College of Surgeons to deliver new cancer clinical audits, which included an audit for bowel cancer, with the aim to strengthen cancer services by looking at all treatments and patient outcomes across England and Wales and reduce inequalities across the country.

Finally, on raising awareness, NHS England also runs national campaigns, most recently in early 2025, to increase knowledge of cancer symptoms, address barriers to acting on them, and to encourage people to see their GP as soon as possible if they notice a change in their health. The campaigns cover bowel cancer and have focused on increasing awareness of a range of symptoms, as well as encouraging general body awareness, to help people spot symptoms across a wide range of cancers at an earlier point.