You have cancer, but there's definitely a bad time when it's too late to treat.

That's the rationale behind the new wave of diagnostic centers.

This is lung cancer scanning in Dagenham.

I'm pleased that my dad's here, I didn't realize that this service was available and I think it's a really good thing.

So because they can pick up The cancer really early.

This program saving lives, we're finding cancers that would not have been found otherwise.

And sorting them out.

The NHS today proclaimed a huge leap forward in screening like this.

The health secretary tweeting thanks to our dedicated NHS staff, a record 100,000 people received earlier cancer diagnosis last year, to which some clinicians respond.

That's great.

Of course we have to actually diagnose people early.

But then if you don't have the capacity to get them through the system and then treat them, they're not going to be all these people diagnosed early and treated and that's where the NHS in England is failing and failing badly.

Cancer treatment.

The target is that 85% of patients should begin treatment within 62 days of an urgent referral figures released today show just 61% of cases begin treatment that quickly.

And looking at the graph of how far that figure has fallen since 2009, you can see the slide began well before the pandemic newsnight analysis of the figures shows that fewer than one in 10 hospital trusts in England are now hitting the target.

That's down from one in two in 2015 for Colin Moss.

The delays in starting treatment for prostate cancer have been one of the most painful parts of his disease.

He took a blood test in September of 2021 which suggested he might have cancer, but it took five months for this to be confirmed by a scan and another five before he had surgery.

That weight was probably the hardest three or four months of my life.

I'm not one to phone up and hassle people all the time.

So I decided enough's enough.

It's been over three months.

I need to phone and ask am I still on the system?

And as time went on week by week, month by month, we still had no answers as to how big it got, whether it's grown at all, whether there was any other effects that were going to occur because of the length of time.

10 months after his first test Colin had surgery.

He's now in remission since the start of the pandemic.

England has had four changes of Health Secretary Matt Hancock to Sajid Javid to steve Barclay to Therese Coffey and now back again to steve Barclay over that time.

The target for the NHS to catch up with the cancer backlog has slipped and slipped.

It was first set for March of 2021.

Then a year later for March 2022 and it now stands at March 2023 and literally no one we've spoken to thinks there's the remotest possibility of that happening.

Professor Peter Johnson is clinical director of cancer for NHS England as part of the National Cancer Covid Recovery Committee.

He helped set and then repeatedly change those targets.

Do you think you're going to hit March 2023 to catch up cancer care?

That's really what we're working towards.

We have to keep trying to hit the system.

We're working everything we can to get to the system back to where we want.

Nobody thinks you're going to hit it.

We've spoken to so many people in cancer care, nobody thinks you're going to get There by 2023.

This is absolutely not the moment to say.

We can't do this.

We have to keep doing it.

It's really important that we bring the people into the system so that we know where they are.

We know where they are with their investigations.

There is a strange feature of these waiting time targets.

They only measure those patients whose GP thinks they might have cancer of these patients.

Only 7-8% will actually turn out to have cancer.

Most cancers are actually picked up after routine non cancer-related referrals and clinicians, we've spoken to say focusing on waiting lists where around 90% of people won't have cancer is actually making things worse.

This consultant oncologist spoke to us anonymously as he feared, speaking out would jeopardize his position at his hospital trust.

Everything is put on hold whether its expansion of digital services, recruitment, retention, expansion of electronic patient records, big cancer investments.

Everything is put on hold because of cancer waiting.

I don't think there's cause for alarm from the waiting list per se.

The cause for alarm should be that it paralyzes the rest of the system.

Much of the cancer crisis then isn't measured in cancer targets.

It's measured in the rest of the system.

Not working, for example, not being able to get a GP appointment means a patient isn't referred for hospital tests and that's how the vast majority of cancers are discovered.

We're talking about end to end delays here and we're talking about end to end friction, which is leading to people of course being diagnosed with much, much later cancers because eventually of course they have catastrophic event.

They then turn up in A and E.

Or they start having red flag events which puts them on the urgent pathway.

So this is a big, big problem.

The routine referrals as in the rest of the NHS, there are huge shortages in staff and the morale of those left is low.

What they want is just to be given the tools to actually work properly.

We've seen our survey now showed that 89% of people either themselves or knew of somebody who was planning to leave their exhausted and in a field like radiotherapy, highly specialized.

You can't get these people.

We know that for therapy, radiography on the front line actually needed physically too treat patients.

There's not enough people in training to actually fill the posts on the fringe of collapse.

That's the ambulance service.

The system across the board is by any measure in crisis.

Over the past year.

Newsnight has reported on almost every aspect of the frontline using exclusive data and analysis, uncovering compelling evidence of a system on the brink.

All of those systems are in crisis.

We are told from people who work in there.

Is the NHS collapsing.

Do you think it doesn't feel like the NHS is collapsing from where I sit in my clinic actually, I see lots of people who are diagnosed and treated.

And if we look at the levels of satisfaction among cancer patients who have been through the treatment process, they're incredibly high, 80-90% of people rate their care as good or extremely good.

So whilst I think it's easy to understand that some people are massively frustrated, Some people undoubtedly wait longer than we would want them to for tests and treatments.

Actually, the NHS is coping and it will get better.

Every cancer found is of course devastating to the person involved.

But at the moment, it's also adding to the backlog in the health service that isn't coping the big issue of inadequate capacity seems to be one that's impervious to the politicians targets.

And as we've seen in some cases, those very targets might be making matters worse.