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 improve the completeness and consistency of data recorded on people diagnosed with secondary breast cancer across NHS Trusts in England, in the context of the latest findings of the National Audit of Metastatic Breast Cancer (NAoMe) published on 10th September.

Via the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS), NHS England collects, curates, quality assures, and analyses data about people with cancer across the whole of England.

The NDRS data improvement team is working with National Health Service trusts to provide support and guidance to improve their reporting of non-primary cancers, focused on the specific recurrence and progression data fields included in the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset. This includes updates on trust submitted recurrence data in our routine ‘diagnoses by provider’ dashboard, available on our NHS facing, secure data quality and insights hub.

The National Cancer Plan for England, published in February this year, committed to define and count recurrent cancers, starting with breast cancer. The NDRS is working towards publishing a baseline figure of metastatic breast cancer patients in the last quarter of 2026 as per the commitment in the plan.