Jeremy Clarkson, Sir Stephen Fry and other high-profile figures, including former prime ministers Lord David Cameron and Rishi Sunak, have written to Health Secretary Yvette Cooper urging her to overturn a decision restricting NHS prostate cancer screening. The letter follows a May ruling by the UK National Screening Committee limiting testing to just 1,500 men with a specific genetic mutation and family history, which the signatories say unfairly leaves other high-risk men, including black men and those with a family history of the disease, without guaranteed access to potentially life-saving tests.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among British men, causing around 63,000 cases and 12,000 deaths annually, roughly one every 45 minutes, often diagnosed too late for effective treatment. The letter notes treating the disease costs £13,000 if caught early but £127,000 if caught late, and argues a targeted national screening programme for high-risk men would cost just £25 million a year, 0.01% of the NHS budget. Separately, up to 10,000 men aged 45 to 74 are being offered a subsidised £99 blood test called Stockholm3, which detects more than twice as many aggressive cancers as standard methods, initially at a London clinic.