Sleeping Dragon Dispatch

Welcome to the first Sleeping Dragon Dispatch.

I started this newsletter because a lot has happened this year, and none of it fits into a short video or a single LinkedIn post. Once a month, in your inbox, I will send you a field report — what has actually moved, what the research is saying, and what I am doing about it.

This month there is only one story worth leading with.

The main eventThe Westminster Hall debate — Monday 26 October, 4.30pm

The House of Commons Petitions Committee has scheduled a debate on prostate cancer screening in Westminster Hall on Monday 26 October at 4.30pm. Toby Perkins MP, my constituency MP in Chesterfield, has committed to attend and speak. Hansard will record every word. Parliament's own YouTube channel will broadcast it live and keep the recording up.

This is not the moment a national screening programme gets voted in. Westminster Hall debates do not work like that. What this Monday does deliver is a formal, on-the-record parliamentary conversation about why 47% of UK diagnoses still happen at stage 3 or 4, why 12,000 men a year still die of a cancer that is almost entirely survivable when found early, and why the country's most commonly diagnosed cancer is still the only major cancer with no national screening programme.

MPs will speak. Ministers will respond. And what any individual MP says — or does not say — will be published, permanently, in their name.

The road hereHow we got to this Monday

The short version:

• June 2026 — the Health Secretary accepted the UK National Screening Committee's recommendation against a general population screening programme. £20 million was committed to research, including expanding the TRANSFORM trial. A limited programme was accepted for BRCA2 carriers with a family history.
• 13 July 2026 — the Parliamentary petition I championed closed with 101,932 signatures. That crossed the threshold at which Parliament formally considers a petition for debate.
• August 2026 — the Government withdrew the 2002 Prostate Cancer Risk Management Programme. Under the old framework, a man aged 50 or over had the right to insist on a PSA test. That right has been removed.
• 8 September 2026 — the Petitions Committee decided the debate would happen, and set the date.
• Monday 26 October, 4.30pm — the debate.

The evidence is being built. The ministerial decision has been made. It can be revisited when the evidence demands it. Monday is one of the ways the country begins to demand it.

This weekWhat you can do between now and Monday

Between now and Monday, the single most useful thing anyone reading this can do is write to their own MP. MPs decide whether they attend the debate. They decide whether they speak. They decide where they stand on the record. What decides them is whether their constituents wrote first.

I have put a letter template on the site. It is one page, it takes about five minutes to personalise, and it names the three asks: attend the debate, speak on record, meet if willing.

If you have already written, thank you. Please forward this to one man you know who has not.

The numberWhere I am, in a line

In February 2025 my PSA was 4,056. As of my September 2026 bloods, it is undetectable. The dragon is sleeping.

Every extra month I get is a month bought by hormone therapy and chemotherapy that, caught earlier, most men do not need.

AheadWhat is coming next

November is Men's Health Awareness Month. Between now and then I am filming a series on what "preserved quality of life" actually looks like from inside long-term hormone therapy — the fatigue, the bone pain, the fog, and what still works despite it. It will land here first.

I also start work as a Patient Expert on a NICE technology appraisal in November, and I will write about that when there is something useful to say.

One more thingPass it on

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