Cancer Registration Statistics, England, 2023

The counts and rates of cancer registration are designated as Accredited Official Statistics. Accredited Official Statistics are a subset of Official Statistics, which have been certified by the UK Statistics Authority as compliant with its code of practice for statistics.

The cancer registry records all diagnoses that are invasive cancer, insitu, uncertain or unknown, and also benign tumours of brain and central nervous system. This is currently defined using the behaviour code in ICD O3 rev 2019. This broadly corresponds to the ICD 10 codes for invasive cancers (C00.0 to C97), in situ tumours (D00.0 to D09.9), selected benign tumours (D32.0 to D33.9, D35.2 to D35.4), tumours of uncertain or unknown behaviour (D37.0 to D48.9), and also some amyloidosis (E85*) and amyloidosis of skin (L99*).

Care should be taken when making comparisons between the historic and latest available data.

Cancer registrations in England can take up to 5 years after the end of a given calendar year to reach 100% completeness, due to the continuing accrual of late registrations. Further changes may still occur after 5 years following later diagnostic testing. However, these late changes are uncommon.

Diagnoses of cancer are registered for each separate cancer; a person may be diagnosed with more than one type of cancer and would then appear more than once in the incidence statistics; the progression or recurrence of previous cancer diagnoses are not counted as new diagnoses.