Sir Bernard Jenkin

Many tests for initial diagnosis of many conditions are unreliable. The problem is that the Government are telling people, “You cannot have a PSA test”, unless, of course, they buy a testing kit from some fly-by-night internet company. There is a lot of that going on, which is clogging up the health system. If someone has a doubt about what is happening down there, it should be possible—indeed, it should be encouraged by GPs—for them to have a PSA test as a precaution. If the result is a false positive, let us find out that it is a false positive. That is a much cheaper option. I mean, look at the number of deaths. Each year, 64,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer and there are 12,000 deaths from it. This is a very serious health situation and we should not be tolerating it. What I see in the system is an excess of caution. Okay, we now have this Transform trial, but its effect will be to put off any further decisions until 2027. Why are we doing that? There is plenty of data and plenty of experience for the Government to make more flexible decisions. One always wonders whether the committees that make these decisions are really independent or whether they are under pressure to control costs, because, of course, if there are more PSA tests, there is a need for more people to scan and to biopsy, and there will be more false positives to deal with, and all of that has a cost. Cost alone should not be the metric; that is not how safety is run in other industries. There needs to be information, and a balanced and independent diagnosis of whether the system is generating the right data. Based on the evidence we already have, we are not testing enough people and we are not doing enough MRI scans. We should be doing much more.