Responding to Liberal Democrats' pledge on cancer waits, Rory Deighton, director of the NHS Confederation’s Acute Network said:

“Health leaders will welcome the Liberal Democrats commitment to focus on cancer waits as they know that despite the hard work of their teams too many patients have been waiting too long for diagnosis and treatment.

“Cancer performance has struggled to recover since the pandemic, when thousands of treatments were cancelled or delayed. This has exacerbated a decade of underinvestment in services and the workforce which has created bottlenecks for cancer patients. New community diagnostics services have greatly increased the NHS’s capacity to diagnose cancers quicker. But we are concerned that without increasing treatment capacity to match diagnostics quicker diagnosis will just leave more patients waiting for treatment than can currently be seen.

“While we welcome the ambition the devil would be in the details when it comes to implementing this kind of pledge. Introducing any new target needs careful planning to ensure that the result does not lead to unintended consequences and ambitions have the right incentives.

“We also welcome the Lib Dem proposal to reverse cuts to public health grant. Improving public health measures and tackling the causes of many cancers is where real gains on preventing cancers can be made. This is why we want the next government to commit to a cross-government national mission for health improvement.

“No matter who forms the next government, they need to commit to ensuring the NHS Long-Term Workforce Plan will be fully funded, so that the NHS has enough staff to meet ever growing demand. We are also calling for more capital investment to tackle crumbling estates so that leaders have the opportunity to invest in new innovations and technology which can directly improve care for patients.”