Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the potential merits of a national screening programme for prostate cancer.

The UK National Screening Committee reviewed the evidence for prostate cancer screening in 2020 and recommended against it due to the insufficient reliability of the best available test, the prostate specific antigen test (PSA test).

The committee is currently undertaking a new evidence review of prostate cancer screening at both a population level and for targeted high-risk groups such as black men and men with a family history of prostate cancer.

However, the reliability of the PSA test remains an issue, which is why the Government has invested £16 million into Prostate Cancer UK’s TRANSFORM trial to investigate whether different tests and more modern treatments can both detect important prostate cancers and reduce the harm of a large scale, population screening programme.