Mr Bayo Alaba

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I thank the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) for securing this important debate. Each year, 63,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer in the UK and, devastatingly, more than 12,000 will die from the disease. That is why I welcome England’s first screening programme, and why we must move at pace to put it into action. We know that while lung cancer screening was recommended in 2022, that has still not been fully implemented. For this programme to make a real difference to health outcomes, we must move quickly on implementation and, more important, ensure that it reaches the men it is designed for. Roughly 30,000 men in the UK carry the BRCA variant, but the vast majority are not aware of it. Those at the highest risk—black men—have historically been underinformed. Black men face double the risk of being diagnosed with prostate cancer compared with their non-black counterparts, yet only 20% are aware of that. As such, black men are often diagnosed at a far later stage, when their cancer has become more difficult to treat and their chances of survival are considerably lower. In my role as a trustee of the black cancer care charity From Me to You, I have witnessed the devastating consequences of late-stage diagnosis and the power of early intervention within the community. I would like to ask the Minister: what steps is the Department taking to help the NHS find men who are unaware of the higher risk they face, either because of their ethnicity or because they carry the BRCA2 variant?