Brain: Tumours

As part of the November 2021 Budget and Spending review, the Department allocated £14 billion to NHS England from 2022/23 to 2024/25 specifically for the National Health Service in England to recover elective and cancer care, including for brain tumours. This comprised of £8 billion of resource funding and £5.9 billion of capital funding, as described in the November 2021 Budget and Spending Review.

As set out in the recent October Budget, we are providing an additional £1.8 billion to directly support elective recovery and activity in 2024/25, which includes cancer care. This funding is being provided to reduce waiting times and support the NHS to deliver 40,000 additional appointments each week.

To support delivery of the operational priorities for cancer, including early diagnosis, NHS England is providing over £250 million in cancer service development funding to Cancer Alliances.

Further to this, in September 2024, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) announced new research funding opportunities for brain cancer research, spanning both adult and paediatric populations. This includes a national NIHR Brain Tumour Research Consortium, to ensure the most promising research opportunities are made available to adult and child patients, and a new funding call to generate high quality evidence in brain tumour care, support, and rehabilitation.

Lord Darzi’s report has set out the scale of the challenges we face in fixing the NHS in England, and the need to improve cancer waiting time performance and cancer survival. The report will inform the Government’s 10-Year Health Plan to reform the NHS in England, including further detail on how we will improve outcomes for cancer.