Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much funding his Department has allocated to cancer research in 2017.

Research is crucial in the fight against cancer. That is why the Department invests £1 billion per year in health research through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

The NIHR’s cancer research expenditure has risen from £101 million in 2010/11 to £136 million in 2017/18. This constitutes the largest investment in a disease area.

As with other Government funders of health research, the NIHR does not allocate funding for specific disease areas. The level of research spend in a particular area is driven by factors including scientific potential and the number and scale of successful funding applications.

The NIHR Clinical Research Network supports the delivery of funded research in the National Health Service to quality, time and target, and has over 800 cancer trials and studies recruiting or in set-up. Through the NIHR Clinical Research Network, the proportion of patients entering cancer clinical trials and studies is more than double that in any other country for which data exists, including the United States.