No, I will not give way. I just want to make my point.
Today is World Cancer Day. This morning, the Secretary of State launched a new document, talking about a 10-year plan for cancer. That reminds us that the NHS is free at the point of delivery, but it is not often free, or even available, at the point of need. Those are two separate
propositions. Often, when people talk about how wonderful our NHS is, they omit to point out that, very often, the NHS is not available at the point of need. That is highlighted by the fact that there were 50,000 fewer cancer diagnoses across the UK during the pandemic, and that, during that time, NHS cancer treatments fell by some 6%. We have information now that compares OECD figures, and it shows that, in the United Kingdom, in 2019—before the pandemic—the rates of fatalities from cancer were 216 per 100,000 people. In the United States, which has a very different system from ours, it was 178 per 100,000 people. In Australia, it was 180 per 100,000 people, and, in Mexico, it was 118 per 100,000 people. The OECD average across 38 countries was 191, so we are an outlier in this country with our NHS in having much higher death rates from cancer than comparable economies and, indeed, much higher death rates than economies that are much less successful economically than our own.
We also have a pretty poor show in terms of diagnostics. We have fewer diagnostics with computerised tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography scanners—CT, MRI and PET scanners—than the average OECD country, by which I mean the 38 countries to which I have referred. The average in the OECD is 45 scanners per 1 million population. In this country, it is only 16 per 1 million population. Is that not a scandal? When we look at the gargantuan waste within certain aspects of the NHS machine, it brings home the gravity of those figures and why we need to draft more resources into the NHS, including resources from the private sector.