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 in the Next steps on the NHS Five Year Forward View report, published in May 2017, what values for survival index and number of cancer patients were used to estimate that an extra 5,000 people to survive their cancer over the next two years.

At the time of writing of the March 2017 report the figures for survival rates for patients followed up until 2016 and until 2017 had to be estimated. Estimates took into account the existing data on the number of new cases (approximately 297,000 in 2014) and assumed that survival rates would continue to increase at rates approximately similar to the ones revealed in the latest data. With these estimated rates instead of the rates applied to those patients followed up until 2015, the number of patients dying from cancer in 2017 would decrease by approximately 5,000. It should be noted that the latest available figures for survival rates support the assumptions in the estimates for the survival rates, as they show an absolute increase in survival of 0.7%, 0.9% and 1% for one, five and 10-year cancer survival rates respectively.