ScottishPower blows us away with £40m raised

We’re excited to announce that our long-term partner ScottishPower has now raised an incredible £40m for cancer research. This monumental amount has been raised in various ways, from the successful Help Beat Cancer energy tariff to its sponsorship of Race for Life and Stand Up To Cancer, as well as the passionate fundraising of ScottishPower’s employees and suppliers.

To celebrate this milestone, ScottishPower recently hosted an event, ‘£40 million, a portfolio of world-leading research, the power is in your hands’, live from their HQ in Glasgow. ScottishPower’s CEO of Customer Business, Andrew Ward, and Cancer Research UK’s CEO Michelle Mitchell hosted the event where they spoke about the power of partnerships and the impact that this partnership has had over 12 years.

To put into context how far £40m can go in terms of cancer research, Dr Anna Kinsella and Hayley Brown from Cancer Research UK’s Science Engagement team led a Dragon’s Den-style activity. They put the audience in the shoes of our funding committees, giving them the power to decide where they would spend £40m across four key research areas: discovery, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. The session demonstrated not only how hard that decision can be, but also how important the fundraising efforts of partnerships are in helping us to continue to make discoveries, drive progress and bring hope to people affected by cancer. 

Partnerships like this exist to improve the lives of people affected by cancer. They exist for the 375,000 people who are diagnosed with cancer in the UK each year, and for the 167,000 people who die of cancer in the UK each year. Each person has a name, a family, people they love, and people they leave behind. 

But there’s reason to be hopeful. Since the mid-1980s, more than one million deaths have been avoided in the UK thanks to advancements in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. The generosity of our supporters and partners makes this possible, and ScottishPower continues to blow us away with their commitment to Cancer Research UK.