Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the evidential basis is for his oral contribution of 1 September 2020, Official Report, column 29, that the backlog of cancer cases built up during the covid-19 outbreak has been reduced by half.

Those figures are drawn from management information that is shared weekly with the Department by NHS England. This shows that the backlog of patients waiting longer than 62 days from an urgent general practitioner referral for suspected cancer to first treatment increased by around 21,000 between the end of March and the end of May 2020. At the end of August, the backlog stood around 8,000 higher than the end of March, a reduction of more than half in the backlog of cancer cases built up during the COVID-19 outbreak.