Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to support local health leaders to address inequalities in the cancer pathway.

Cancer Alliances are leading local transformation of cancer services and outcomes to deliver the ambitions of the NHS Long Term Plan, which includes actions to reduce health inequalities and ensure every one with cancer can access screening, diagnosis and treatment services. To enable this, Cancer Alliances receive funding to deliver improvement projects, which is adjusted for health need and deprivation of the local population using the clinical commissioning group (CCG) weighted capitation formula.

Each Cancer Alliance is regularly provided with data for their Alliance, CCGs and trusts, as well as a comparison with the other Cancer Alliances and an England benchmark. The Cancer Alliance Data, Evidence and Analysis Service is also working with partners to produce inequality breakdowns of key cancer data for Cancer Alliances to use, such as data on smoking prevalence by deprivation quintiles at Cancer Alliance level. This data and analysis enables local system leaders to understand inequalities and target actions to reduce them.