What we’ve learnt from the latest breast screening data

As screening is the route most likely to find breast cancer early, when survival rates are highest, making sure as many eligible women as possible take up their invite is a priority for us.

Increasing screening uptake is also a core part of NHS England’s strategy to drive earlier diagnosis and save lives, as set out in the new Cancer Plan for England published last month.

Here, we run down some of the key things we’ve learnt from this data release and what it means for early breast cancer diagnosis.

Between 2024 and 2025, 70.6% of women aged 50 to 71 took up their invite to take part in breast screening. While this is a very small increase from last year's 70.0% uptake, it’s still slightly below where attendance was a decade ago. It's also well below the 80% achievable target we want to see the programme meet.

Our analysis suggests that if the 80% target was met in 2024-25, over a quarter of a million (259,519) more women in England would have been screened and 2,228 more breast cancers would have been found.

The recovery in uptake post-pandemic is really positive to see. But it’s clear more needs to be done to build on this progress and deliver higher attendance rates in the future.

While uptake overall has levelled off, the picture across England differs a lot, with uptake ranging from 55.8% in one area of London to 81.0% in a screening unit in Nottinghamshire. Only 3 out of 77 screening units in England reached the 80% achievable target, and 25 units missed the minimum 70% standard.

The government’s analysis shows that the proportion of women that are up to date with their breast screening in an area depends on how deprived that place is.

Women of screening age in the most deprived parts of England are much less likely to have undergone breast screening in the last 3 years, compared to women in the least deprived areas.

That gap has to close if we are going to address the unequal levels of early diagnosis in the country, which drive health inequalities in breast cancer survival.

We were really glad to see the new Cancer Plan direct local services to work with communities on targeted campaigns to improve screening attendance in deprived, ethnic minority and underserved groups. This follows on from the national breast screening awareness campaign we secured last year.

One place where uptake is really strong is in women who attended their previous screening: 89.1% of women who had been screened in the last 5 years took up their invite in 2024-25.

Given the high uptake once women are screened, the lower levels of uptake in first time invitees are a real concern.

Only 63.6% of first time invitees attended their screening appointment in 2024-25, missing the 70% minimum standard across all the regions in England. Only 14 out of 77 screening units reached 70% uptake amongst first time invitees, and none reached 80%.

We know that worries and misconceptions about breast cancer and the screening process can put women off attending their first appointment.

So, promoting and sharing information about breast screening, along with making screening convenient for women - mostly in their early 50s - who are being invited for the first time, are both going to be crucial to closing this gap in attendance. Our screening blueprint and statement on inequalities set out the changes we think would help make this a reality.

It’s positive to see some progress being made on this issue as part of the Cancer Plan, which commits to inviting women to screening and allowing them to manage their appointments through the NHS App by 2028.

Eligible women are automatically invited to screening every 3 years, but some are screened after a GP referral or getting in contact with the service themselves. This can be because they did not respond to their invite, or because they are over 70 and therefore are only screened if they ask to be.

In 2024-25, over 175,000 women were screened after a GP or self-referral, with most (almost 2/3s) being women over 70.

This number is slightly below the peak seen when the programme was recovering from COVID disruption in 2020-21, when many women were catching up with health appointments missed during the pandemic. However, it’s still much higher than the number of requests the programme was getting pre-pandemic.

Given the UK’s ageing population, the number of women over 70 opting to continue breast screening could continue to increase in coming years.

In addition to standard mammography every 3 years, the national breast screening programme runs a very-high risk pathway for women with an above 40% lifetime risk of developing breast cancer.

These women are offered screening every year from a younger age and are much more likely to be diagnosed. In the standard screening programme, for every 1,000 women screened, 8.6 breast cancers are found. That's compared to the very-high risk pathway, where 18.7 breast cancers are found for every 1,000 women screened.

The number of women who are part of this very-high risk programme has doubled over the last 8 years.

The surge in demand is likely due to the expanding eligibility for breast cancer patients and their family members to get genetically tested, alongside programmes like the one offering BRCA testing to Jewish people, who are more likely to carry harmful alterations in those genes.

These are positive steps that should mean more women at increased risk are found and offered screening that can help catch their cancers earlier. But we’re still concerned about women at moderate and high risk, who are not screened through the national programme, and are therefore less likely to be offered additional screening that’s in line with their risk level.

So, demand for breast screening is strong, but the programme still needs to do more to give everyone a fair chance at an early diagnosis through screening.

Alongside this year’s data, NHS England published their Breast Screening Uptake Review, setting out the steps it has taken to improve uptake and what else it’s going to do to boost attendance.

We’ve been pushing for this to be shared since the plan was first developed. We’re happy to see commitments we’ve been calling for included in the review. But this data shows us how much work there is left to do.

In future updates, we’ll be taking a closer look at the changes the programme has made and where we think there are still gaps.