Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what comparative assessment his Department has made of the number of people diagnosed with cancer in (a) 2020 and (b) the last five years.

In the most recent year for which data are available, 2018, 320,395 primary cancers were diagnosed in England. The total for the most recent five years for which data are available, 2014-2018, was 1,528,923.

The data is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/cancer-registration-statistics-england-2018-final-release

The data presented represents diagnoses of cancer rather than individual people as people may be diagnosed with more than one type of cancer in a given year.