Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy to establish a metastatic breast cancer data taskforce to (a) identify barriers to data collection, (b) share best practice and (c) monitor progress on improving data completeness across England.

The Department recognises the importance of robust and timely data on people diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer to support service planning and improve outcomes.

The National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) in NHS England collects, curates, quality assures, and analyses data about people with cancer across the whole of England. The NDRS data improvement team is working with National Health Service trusts to provide support and guidance to improve their reporting of non-primary cancers, focused on the specific recurrence and progression data fields included in the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset.

The recently published National Cancer Plan for England sets out an ambition to define and count recurrent cancers, starting with metastatic breast cancer. This provides a unique opportunity to identify barriers to data collection, share best practice, and monitor progress on improving data completeness across England.