Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 26 February 2018 to Question 127294, on cancer, and with reference to paragraph 7 of the Next steps on the NHS Five Year Forward View report, published in March 2017 on survival rates, between what years have been compared to reach the estimate of 7,000 more people are surviving cancer after NHS treatment than would have three years before; and what values for survival index and number of cancer patients were used to arrive at this number.

The figure for the number of lives saved over three years is the difference between two figures:

- the number of deaths from cancer occurring in one year, taking into account the last published set of survival rates (these were for patients followed up until 2015, at the time of writing of the March 2017 report) and the number of new cancer cases each year (there were approximately 297,000 new cancer cases in 2014); and

- the number of deaths which would have occurred if survival rates were lagging three years behind.

The survival rates used in computing the two figures above (shown in the table below) reveal an increase in all published cancer survival rates in the last three years. Approximately 7,000 more people would have died from cancer in 2015 if survival rates had still been those that applied to patients followed up until 2011.

Survival rates (scale 0 - 100) of patients diagnosed with cancer in England (Office for National Statistics)