Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will make an assessment of the impact of trends in average waiting times for biomarker and genomic testing on waiting times for cancer treatment.

NHS England has implemented capturing of Patient Level Contract Monitoring data across the National Health Service Genomic Laboratory Hubs (GLHs) to facilitate a national approach to reporting and validating activity data and turnaround times. This will enable NHS England to understand activity volumes, detect any backlogs, and institute recovery. NHS England undertakes a quarterly assurance process with each of the NHS GLHs to monitor improvements in turnaround times to ensure these are being met in every region and for all patients.

NHS England is also undertaking a programme of work alongside clinical experts, including the Medical Royal Colleges, to establish clinically relevant cancer turnaround times across diagnosis, prognosis, treatment determining clinical use cases and optimising cancer pathways to ensure genomic test results are provided in a clinically relevant timeframe.