Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the causes of variations in the level of access to to cancer screening by people of BAME heritage.

As part of uptake improvement, NHS England has carried out a range of insight work across the three different cancer screening programmes to better understand barriers to coming forward. NHS operational planning guidance 2023/24 supports tackling inequalities with one priority being that health systems are requested to ensure that datasets are timely and complete, with an emphasis on ethnicity coding.

Having more complete and timely data on ethnicity will help to more clearly see how interventions are working across different communities. NHS England is committed to addressing health inequalities using the Core20PLUS5 approach which focuses on vulnerable and under-served groups, including ethnic minority communities.