Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:14 pm on 18 September 2018.
Well, all I can say is that we have the highest survival rates yet reported, and that surely is something that we should welcome—72.7 per cent of those diagnosed between 2005-09 and 2010-14 survived at least one year, 57.1 per cent are expected to survive at least five years, and premature death caused by cancer has fallen by around 10 per cent in the past decade. Those figures speak for themselves in terms of what's happened with cancer delivery. [Interruption.] Well, she talks of targets—that's a fair question—but the answer I give is, 'Look at the results'. The reality is that there are more and more people who are not just being cured—that's five years free of cancer—but also living with cancer in a way that was impossible 10 or 15 years ago, and I think that that is something for us to celebrate. Yes, of course, we want to make sure that more people are seen as quickly as possible, and 85.9 per cent of people newly diagnosed with cancer via the urgent route started definitive treatment within the target time in June, 97.4 per cent of those not via the urgent route. But we can see from the survival rates that things are moving in the right direction.