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 help ensure NHS England meets its target of 80 per cent breast screening uptake across all regions and eligible groups.

The NHS Breast Screening Programme is seeing improvement in uptake nationally with annual data from NHS England for 2024/25 showing 70.6% of women attending their appointment. However, there is much more to do.

NHS England recently published a review of national actions to improve uptake and next steps. This review details actions taken at a national level so far, such as working towards introducing digital options for sending out invitations and managing appointments, raising awareness of the importance of screening through the media, and facilitating learning and gathering evidence to inform programme policy, pathway changes, and guidance.

The review supports breast screening service providers with national solutions, as well as setting out the focus to drive uptake even further. The programme of work will continue to evolve, reflecting and learning from ongoing improvements to the programme, including from data intelligence and digital innovation. The review is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/tackling-the-uptake-challenge-a-review-of-progress-and-next-steps/tackling-the-uptake-challenge-a-review-of-progress-and-next-steps#national-actions-to-improve-uptake-and-next-steps