Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to make cervical smear tests more accessible for women with (a) newborn babies and (b) young children.

The cervical screening programme uses the HPV test not the cervical smear test. This has been in place since late 2019 and detects the HPV virus which causes 99.7% of cervical cancers.

We are committed to improving the uptake of the cervical screening programme, in line with the long term plan aim of detecting more people at risk of developing cervical cancer and facilitating their treatment to prevent cancer developing.

Local NHS services have a duty to ensure that their services are as accessible as possible for their local populations and that any appropriate support is in place, depending on individual need.

We are working to test the effectiveness of HPV self-sampling as a primary cervical screening option. The findings from this evaluation will be used to inform a UK National Screening Committee recommendation and it is expected that self-sampling could lead to an increase in uptake as it will reduce some of the barriers that prevent people from attending for screening.