National Cancer Plan for the Next Decade Released in England

On February 4, 2026, the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England published the National Cancer Plan, setting out a decade-long, technology-enabled transformation of cancer services, with substantial commitments to diagnostics, AI, genomics, robotic surgery, digital tools, and innovation-driven care pathways. These initiatives aim to modernize the NHS, expand early detection, personalize treatment, and improve outcomes, anchoring cancer care in innovation and digital integration. The key ambition is that, by 2035, three out of four people diagnosed with cancer will be cancer-free, or living well with cancer after five years.

The Plan is structured over six strategic pillars, accompanied by actions, commitments, and case studies: Driving up NHS cancer performance; A global leader in cancer outcomes by 2035; Designing cancer care around people’s lives; Delivering world-class cancer care through world-class research; Children and young people’s cancer; Rare and less common cancers.

Examples of key commitments and actions are provided below.

• Expand the Community Diagnostic Centres' capacity during the next 3 years.
• Harness digital, home, and community innovations to make better use of diagnostic capacity.
• Prioritize technologies with the most promise to transform the cancer pathway: blood biomarker tests, that will increasingly enable population scale asymptomatic detection; saliva, urine and breath diagnostics, that enable at-home and more frequent testing; wearable technology that, in combination, will increasingly indicate when intervention is needed; faster, more local and more portable diagnostics – so that risk can be met with intervention proactively, without the need for multiple long waits.
• Extend ctDNA (liquid biopsy) and other biomarker testing to other cancers (subject to efficacy and value for money). These tests are already used in the NHS for non-small cell lung cancer and breast cancer. Proactively prepare for Multi-Cancer Early Detection tests (MCEDs) and similar breakthroughs.
• Expand histopathology capacity: invest in digital diagnostics, including digital pathology, and automate histopathology to speed up the processing and reporting of tissue samples. Increase productivity by transitioning to digital and robotic automation-enabled histopathology pathways, with AI further enhancing capability.
• Consider the 10 Year Health Plan’s ‘5 big bets’ - data, robotics, AI, wearable technology, and genomics - to improve treatment capacity.
• Increase the use of robotic surgery. Priorities will include head and neck and gynecological cancers.
• Investing in state-of-the-art radiotherapy machines. Use AI for radiotherapy planning. Streamline the process for approving new uses of Stereotactic Ablative Radiotherapy (SABR) and incentivize its use.

See more details here.

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