Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what policy steps her Department is taking to address diagnoses gaps in routine NHS screening.

We are guided by the independent scientific advice of the UK National Screening Committee on all screening matters. It is only where there is robust evidence that an offer to screen provides more good than harm that a screening programme is recommended, and in those cases, each programme has both an upper and lower age range, within which there is strong scientific evidence that the benefits of screening outweigh the harms.