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What it means for the brain tumour community
England’s National Cancer Plan, published on 4 Feb 2026, makes history as the first cancer strategy to include a dedicated chapter on rare and less common cancers. For the brain tumour community, which has advocated relentlessly for recognition and resources, this represents a significant victory. Our voices have been heard and we
should acknowledge the role of the community for this achievement. The plan commits that 75% of patients diagnosed from 2035 will be cancer-free or living well after five years – language that acknowledges quality of life alongside survival. Crucially though, the plan confirms that we’re not going to achieve our goals without
looking at the rarer, less common and more difficult cancers. Brain tumours are no longer an afterthought. The question now is whether ambition translates into action; change only happens with strong delivery.

The highs: real wins for people living with a brain tumour 

A dedicated rare cancers chapter and leadership.

For the first time, a chapter specifically prioritises rare and less common cancers, personally driven by Minister Ashley Dalton. A new National Lead for Rare and Less Common Cancers will provide strategic oversight, ensuring these cancers receive sustained attention. Officials acknowledged that achieving the plan’s survival ambition is
impossible without addressing cancers like brain tumours, placing rare cancers at the heart of the strategy, not the margins.

Revolutionary clinical trial access via the NHS App

Patients will search for clinical trials through the NHS App and request contact from researchers. Eventually, patients can sign up to automatically receive details of trials that might benefit them. The Be Part of Research service will be integrated into the app to match patients with rare cancers to appropriate trials. For brain tumours, where only 12% of patients participate in trials, the lowest of any cancer type, this digital transformation could be game-changing.

Tackling commercial research barriers
The government is properly investigating the commercial challenges for companies who can conduct research in the more difficult cancers. This recognition that rare cancers face unique commercial barriers (small patient populations, longer trial timelines) signals potential regulatory and financial support to incentivise pharmaceutical
investment in brain tumour research.

Genomics and precision medicine
Every patient who could benefit will be offered genomic testing to analyse their cancer’s DNA, enabling personalised treatment selection. The plan commits to ensuring results are returned quickly enough for patients to join clinical trials, critical for brain tumours where genomic profiling increasingly guides treatment decisions.

Prehabilitation as standard
Prehabilitation (preparing patients physically and mentally before treatment) is now embedded in the plan with clear signposting. For brain tumour patients facing complex surgery or radiotherapy, prehab can improve outcomes and recovery. This shift from treating illness to building resilience represents a fundamental change in approach.

Specialist centre access and robot-assisted surgery
More patients with rarer cancers will have their care reviewed and treated at specialist centres with expert multidisciplinary teams. Robot-assisted procedures will expand from 70,000 to 500,000 by 2035, including cancer operations, reducing complications and improving precision, particularly relevant for delicate brain surgery.

Waiting time commitments
The NHS commits to meeting all cancer waiting time standards by March 2029, meaning hundreds of thousands more patients will receive timely treatment. For brain tumours, where delays can mean inoperability, this matters profoundly.

The lows: what’s missing and what remains uncertain
The uncomfortable truth about the 25%. The plan’s headline target of 75% of patients cancer-free or living well after five years by 2035 means 25% will not be. For aggressive brain cancers like glioblastoma, we believe that patients are disproportionately represented in that 25%. While the plan acknowledges that achieving goals requires focus on more difficult cancers is encouraging, the stark reality remains: brain tumours trail behind Croatia and Romania
in survival rates.

No ringfenced research funding
The historic underfunding of brain tumour research, whilst identified as a cancer of unmet need by CRUK, is not explicitly addressed with new, dedicated funding. While the NIHR Brain Tumour Research Consortium and commercial research barrier investigations are positive, without significant investment uplift, outcomes will not
fundamentally change. The plan’s 10-year vision includes aspirational commitments, but much depends on future spending reviews.

No national awareness campaigns
The current spending settlement includes no funding for national awareness campaigns. For brain tumours, where symptoms are vague and public awareness low, local Cancer Alliance-led campaigns may not provide the coordinated, sustained messaging needed to improve prompt diagnosis.

Low-grade tumours still at risk of exclusion
Low-grade brain tumours, often not classified as malignant; face continued risk of exclusion from cancer programmes despite their devastating impact. The plan does not explicitly address this classification issue, meaning vigilance is required to ensure all brain tumours are included.

Implementation details remain unclear
Critical questions remain unanswered: When will the National Lead for Rare Cancers be appointed? How will quality standards prioritise brain tumours? What specific timeline governs Rare Cancers Bill implementation? How will the shift to neighbourhood services ensure continued access to specialist neuro-oncology centres? The plan provides vision; delivery requires detail.

What we must do now: from advocacy to accountability

The brain tumour community should feel proud. Years of advocacy have secured unprecedented recognition in this plan. But recognition is not enough. We must now shift from advocacy to accountability: 1. Demand rapid appointment of the National Lead for Rare and Less Common Cancers, with clear terms of reference and resources.
2. Push for brain tumours to be prioritised in the first wave of cancer-specific quality standards development.
3. Monitor NHS App integration closely, ensuring Be Part of Research; genuinely matches brain tumour patients with relevant trials and that the technology works seamlessly.
4. Hold government accountable on commercial research barrier investigations – we need concrete actions, not just acknowledgment.
5. Ensure low-grade tumours are explicitly included in all programmes, guidelines, and data collection.
6. Continue demanding increased research funding in future spending reviews.

Conclusion: a moment to celebrate but let’s get back to work. 

This plan is not perfect and the job is not done. It will not immediately solve brain tumour survival rates. But it represents something we have not had before: explicit recognition, dedicated leadership, structural support for clinical trial access, and acknowledgment that achieving cancer survival goals requires tackling the hardest
cancers. The shift in language from survival and cure to cancer-free and living well reflects patient-centred thinking. The emphasis on prehabilitation, quality of life measures, and wraparound support shows the plan understands that outcomes extend beyond mortality statistics. Most importantly, brain tumours are no longer invisible. Minister Gwynne acknowledged we haven’t progressed at all. Officials confirmed they cannot succeed without us. We
pushed on that open door and it opened. Now comes the hard work: ensuring the National Cancer Board prioritises rare and less common cancers in implementation, that funding follows ambition in future spending reviews, that the National Lead for Rare Cancers has real power, and that every commitment in this plan translates into tangible improvements for people living with brain tumours. For the 88,000 people living with a brain tumour in the UK, this is a day to celebrate what we have achieved together. Tomorrow, we return to the work of making sure these
words on paper become reality in hospitals, clinics, research laboratories and in our homes across England.
As Lord Vallance noted, this work will make a real difference in helping more cancer patients access trials and accelerate getting new life-changing treatments to those who need the. For brain tumour patients, that difference cannot come soon enough.
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Note: Analysis based on the National Cancer Plan for England published 5 February 2026, stakeholder
briefings 4 February 2026, and official government announcements.

Colloid Cyst Community online meet up – Fri 20th Feb 13.00Events, Patient & Carer Events

Introduction

The Brain Tumour Data Dashboard lets you explore up -to-date, population level data about the brain tumours diagnosed in England between 2013 and 2015. Using the drop down menus on the left you can select different groups of patients to view in the charts below. In these charts the number of patients for every 100 diagnoses is displayed as images of people. Patients have been grouped by date of diagnosis, type of tumour, age, gender, and region in England.

For each group of patients you can explore the different routes to diagnosis, the proportion of those who received chemotherapy or radiotherapy, as well as the survival of the patients within each group. For more information about what these metrics mean please see the glossary.

How to use

  1. Select the year of diagnosis using the drop down menu.
  2. Select your patient group of interest from the four drop down menus in the following order:
    1. Tumour group
    2. Age at diagnosis
    3. Region of England
    4. Gender of patient
  3. To view a second chart to compare different groups of patients, click the ‘compare’ button.The second chart will appear below the first chart.

*Note that the tool is best used on a laptop or tablet rather than a mobile phone*

Unavailable data

Some of the data in these charts is not available.There are two main reasons for this:

  1. How the data has been grouped

If you cannot select a patient group from the drop down menus, the data is unavailable because of how the data has been organised.

Public Health England has grouped the data like a branching tree. The bottom of the tree contains all the patients with brain tumours, and then each branch divides the data by a certain characteristics, like age, or location of tumour. But the data is divided in an order, starting with location of the tumour (endocrine or brain), then by age, region, and gender. Age is at the start because it makes a bigger difference to survival rates and treatment rates than gender or region. Sometimes, after the data has been split by type of tumour and age, there is not enough data to be split again. This is because to protect patient confidentiality groups cannot contain less than 100 patients. Because some groups cannot be split further, you cannot create ‘totals’ for everyone by region or gender. For example, you cannot see results for all ages by region, or all brain tumours by gender. If these totals were calculated and released, it might be possible to identify patients, which is why Public Health England cannot release this data.

  1. Statistical reasons and data availability

If you can select a patient group from the chart menus, but the chart does not display, the data is unavailable for one of several reasons:

  1. Data is not yet available for the selected year from Public Health England.
  2. Data is not available because the data quality is too poor to release this statistic.
  3. Data is not available as the statistic is not appropriate for this group.
  4. Data is not available because the standard error of the estimate was greater than 20% and so the estimate has been supressed.

Up to date brain tumour data

Brain tumour data may influence the decisions you make about your care. Data also helps you understand the bigger picture, or landscape, in which you find yourself.

Brain tumour data and statistics influence the focus, and work of organisations like brainstrust. The information helps us to understand the scale and impact of the problems we are setting out to solve.

This tool helps you understand the landscape in which you find yourself having been diagnosed with a brain tumour. This landscape can be particularly tricky to navigate as there are many different types of brain tumour, all of which have a different impact.

The information you see represents the most up-to-date, official, population level brain tumour data available for England. Over time we will be adding to the brain tumour data available and publishing reports, with recommendations, as a result of what we learn from this data.

The data behind this content has come from Public Health England’s National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) and is a direct result of the ‘Get Data Out’ project.

This project provides anonymised population level brain tumour data for public use in the form of standard output tables, accessible here: http://cancerdata.nhs.uk/standardoutput

Incidence

The number or rate (per head of population) of new cases of a disease diagnosed in a given population during a specified time period (usually a calendar year). The crude rate is the total number of cases divided by the mid-year population, usually expressed per 100,000 population.

Malignant

Malignant tumours which grow by invasion into surrounding tissues and have the ability to metastasise to distant sites

Mortality

The number or rate (per head of population) of deaths in a given population during a specified time period (usually a calendar year). The crude rate is the total number of deaths divided by the mid-year population, usually expressed per 100,000 population.

Non-malignant

Not cancerous. Non-malignant tumours may grow larger but do not spread to other parts of the body.

Survival

The length of time from the date of diagnosis for a disease, such as cancer, that patients diagnosed with the disease are still alive. In a clinical trial, measuring the survival is one way to see how well a new treatment works. Also called ‘overall survival’ or ‘OS’.

Routes to Diagnosis

Under the ‘Routes to Diagnosis’ tab in the Brain Tumour Data Dashboard, you can explore the ways patients have been diagnosed with brain tumours. There are many ways, or routes, for cancers to be diagnosed in the NHS. A ‘route to diagnosis’ is the series of events between a patient and the healthcare system that leads to a diagnosis of cancer. The routes include:

  1. Two Week Wait

Patients are urgently referred by their GP for suspected cancer via the Two Week Wait system and are seen by a specialist within 2 weeks where they are diagnosed.

  1. GP referral

Diagnosis via a GP referral includes routine and urgent referrals where the patient was not referred under the Two Week Wait system.

  1. Emergency Presentation

Cancers can be diagnosed via emergency situations such as via A&E, emergency GP referral, emergency transfer or emergency admission.

  1. Outpatient

Outpatient cancer diagnoses include diagnoses via an elective route which started with an outpatient appointment that is either a self-referral or consultant to consultant referral. (It does not include those under the Two Week Wait referral system).

  1. Inpatient elective

Diagnosis via an inpatient elective route is where diagnosis occurs after the patient has been admitted into secondary care from a waiting list, or where the admission is booked or planned.

  1. Death Certificate Only

Diagnoses made by Death Certificate Only are made where there is no more information about the cancer diagnosis other than the cancer related death notifications. The date of diagnosis is the same as that of the date of death.

  1. Unknown

For some patients with a cancer diagnosis, there is no relevant data available to understand the route to diagnosis.

 

More information

If any of the statistical terms in this section of the brainstrust website are hard to understand, we recommend looking them up here:

Cancer Research UK’s Cancer Statistics Explained

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/cancer-stats-explained/statistics-terminology-explained#heading-Seven

If you are looking for help understanding terms relating specifically to brain tumours, and treatment, then the brainstrust glossary is available here:

https://www.brainstrust.org.uk/advice-glossary.php