Labour has vowed to meet all NHS cancer waiting time targets – which have not been met for over a decade – within just three years and pledged that more people will survive cancer, as part of its flagship 10-year plan to tackle the disease.
Under the long-awaited National Cancer Plan, set to be unveiled on Wednesday, the government promised to meet all NHS waiting time targets for cancer by 2029, by accelerating diagnosis and speeding up treatment times across the country.
The government also pledged that 75 per cent of patients diagnosed from 2025 will be cancer-free or living well after five years – up from 60 per cent currently. It also said it will:
- Diagnose or rule out cancer within 28 days of a referral for 75 per cent of patients
- Ensure 96 per cent of patients start treatment within 31 days of doctors deciding they need treatment
- treat 85 per cent of patients within 62 days of a referral
- offer more robotic-assisted procedures and ramp up genomic testing to allow for more personalised treatments
Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting, who was himself treated for kidney cancer in 2021, said: “Cancer survival shouldn’t come down to who won the lottery of life. But cancer is more likely to be a death sentence in Britain than in other countries around the world.
“As a cancer survivor who owes my life to the NHS, I owe it to future patients to make sure they receive the same outstanding care I did.
“Thanks to the revolution in medical science and technology, we have the opportunity to transform the life chances of cancer patients. Our cancer plan will invest in and modernise the NHS, so that opportunity can be seized and our ambitions realised.”
But experts have warned that the government will need to scale up the workforce if the plan is to succeed.
Richard Evans, chief executive of the Society of Radiographers (SoR), said: “We had a cancer plan for England previously, but it wasn’t properly funded,” he says. “Nothing will happen without investment.”
The NHS has not met the 62-day treatment target, first introduced in 2000, since 2015, and the most recent data from November 2025 shows just 70 per cent of patients were treated within this time.
Meanwhile, 76.5 per cent of people were diagnosed, or had cancer ruled out, within 28 days of an urgent referral, and 91.7 per cent of people started treatment within 31 days of doctors deciding a treatment plan.
Sarah Scobie, deputy director of research at health think tank the Nuffield Trust, said the ambition in the new plan was “very welcome” but cautioned “the NHS will still find them incredibly difficult to meet based on current performance”.
She said between April and November 2025, there was only a 0.1 per cent improvement in the proportion of patients waiting under 62 days to start cancer treatment.
To meet its 85 per cent target by March 2029, the NHS would need to make improvements of 0.4 per cent each month – 30 times the improvement rate it has managed since April.
Among the announcements due to be featured in the new cancer plan, the Department for Health and Social Care also promised that 75 per cent of patients diagnosed from 2025 will be cancer-free or living well after five years.
The UK currently lags behind comparable countries such as Australia and Canada on cancer survival, and according to research by the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership published in 2024, people in the UK were treated with chemotherapy and radiotherapy less frequently and faced longer waits to start treatment.
The cancer plan, due to be published in full on Wednesday, will also promise to increase the number of robot-assisted procedures from 70,000 to half a million by 2035 and deliver 9.5 million additional cancer tests by 2029.
The plan will also feature nods to increased use of genomic testing, which can analyse the DNA of cancers to help doctors tailor a more tailored and effective treatment for patients. Patients will also be able to get access to cancer tests at any hospital in their region.
Ms Scobie added: “This would be an enormous feat to maintain, and we are still awaiting details on how it would be funded. The UK lags behind other countries in cancer outcomes and faces longstanding gaps in investment and staff, with key equipment like diagnostic scanners in short supply compared to countries like Germany, Sweden and Italy...
“Making the UK ‘world-leading’ on cancer will take time and the commitment of scarce resources in a health service already under pressure.”
The SoR warned that for the plan to succeed, the government will also need to publish a plan to scale up the workforce to deliver it with funding to support it.
Mr Evans added: “The SoR hopes to be positive about the forthcoming cancer plan. But what matters really is how the plan will work in practice.
“Only with investment will therapeutic radiography once again become a viable – and desirable – career option for young people. Only by investing in the therapeutic radiography workforce can we guarantee that cancer patients receive the treatment they need, when they need it.”
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