Standalone Cancer Strategy Confirmed – What’s Next for Breast Cancer UK?

Written by Gareth Lloyd-Johnson, our Head of Public Affairs and Campaigns.

It will come as no shock to you that we are delighted to hear the Government confirmed that they are starting work on a standalone Cancer Strategy. In fact, ‘delighted’ possibly undersells it. This is potentially huge for our work and wider cancer prevention.

I suspect that you would be surprised to find out that the UK hasn’t had a functioning cancer plan over the last few years. The last Government tried to work around this with the now-scrapped plans for a Major Conditions Strategy, which we opposed.

The real hard work starts now.

We always argued that to tackle something as enormous and complex as cancer would require a standalone strategy which could get into the nuance of cancer. We believed it so much, that we made it a key ask in our manifesto.

So, a good job done.

Yes…but. From our point of view, the real hard work starts now. It’s great that we are going to have the Cancer Strategy but getting the content right is absolutely vital now.

Our fear is that the strategy starts from the point of screening and early diagnosis, rather than comprehensively covering prevention. This would be such a wasted opportunity.

We must move away from treating people when they get sick, to preventing people getting sick.

This is where we come in.

We will be working hard to make sure that this Cancer Strategy delivers on prevention. Crucially, it has to look at all of the aspects of modern life that can impact our breast cancer risk and, of course, we want to see exposure to harmful chemicals in there.

There’s no doubt, this is an exciting time for us and 2025 could be a pivotal year for tackling breast cancer. You’ll see plenty from us over the coming weeks and months about how you can help us to make sure that prevention is a key part of the Cancer Strategy.

• awareness
• BCUK
• Breast cancer
• breast cancer prevention
• Breast Cancer UK
• cancer
• Government
• policy
• prevention
• reduce your risk
• science
• strategy