Baroness Northover

NHS England runs Help Us Help You campaigns to increase knowledge of cancer symptoms and address barriers to acting on them, to encourage people to come forward as soon as possible to see their general practitioner. The campaigns focus on a range of symptoms, encouraging body awareness to help people spot symptoms across a wide range of cancers at an early point.

Unitaid are a leading funder of innovative tools to find and treat cervical cancer in low and middle income countries, laying the groundwork for national cervical cancer elimination programmes worldwide. The Department highly values its partnership with Unitaid, and has contributed more than half a billion pounds in funding.

The Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) National Review of maternity services in England 2022 to 2024 shines a light on the serious issues that exist within maternity services.

The Government is taking the findings and recommendations made in the CQC’s report seriously and has committed to ensuring that trusts failing on maternity care are robustly supported into rapid improvement, whilst training thousands more midwives and setting an explicit target to close the Black and Asian maternal mortality gap.

The Government will continue to work with the National Health Service as it delivers its 3-year maternity and neonatal plan to grow the maternity workforce, develop a culture of safety, and ensure women receive safe, compassionate care.

The UK supports local organisations through our Africa-Led movement to End Female Genital Mutilation: Phase II programme. The full list of organisations who received Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) grants during this period is available on: https://thegirlgeneration.org/eeey-grantees/. The grant mechanism was fully operational in 2024, granting to 53 organisations, with a focus on small grassroots organisations. The grants ranged from £400 to £100,000.

Evaluation assessments are taking place in March 2025 to understand the full impact of the grants. Early results show that from April 2024 to December 2024, grantee partners reached over 64,159 people through locally-led, community-based end-FGM initiatives. These included meetings with religious and community leaders, training, and support to girl champions, and school-based initiatives. Small grantee partners have made inroads into harder to reach communities. The programme has supported nine grantee partner representatives and 12 champions to participate in national, regional or global advocacy spaces. 46 grantees have also reported stronger organisational capacity, structures and systems.

In addition, the UK is funding local organisations through mechanisms such as the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women and the Equality Fund. Some of these grantees are prioritising FGM, for example, the UNTF supported International Solidarity Foundation in Somalia (2020-2023), which has increased the proportion of religious leaders who believed that all types of FGM are harmful from 52 per cent to 96 per cent.

The UK supports local organisations through our Africa-Led movement to End Female Genital Mutilation: Phase II programme. The full list of organisations who received Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) grants during this period is available on: https://thegirlgeneration.org/eeey-grantees/. The grant mechanism was fully operational in 2024, granting to 53 organisations, with a focus on small grassroots organisations. The grants ranged from £400 to £100,000.

Evaluation assessments are taking place in March 2025 to understand the full impact of the grants. Early results show that from April 2024 to December 2024, grantee partners reached over 64,159 people through locally-led, community-based end-FGM initiatives. These included meetings with religious and community leaders, training, and support to girl champions, and school-based initiatives. Small grantee partners have made inroads into harder to reach communities. The programme has supported nine grantee partner representatives and 12 champions to participate in national, regional or global advocacy spaces. 46 grantees have also reported stronger organisational capacity, structures and systems.

In addition, the UK is funding local organisations through mechanisms such as the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women and the Equality Fund. Some of these grantees are prioritising FGM, for example, the UNTF supported International Solidarity Foundation in Somalia (2020-2023), which has increased the proportion of religious leaders who believed that all types of FGM are harmful from 52 per cent to 96 per cent.

Unitaid are a leading funder of innovative tools to find and treat cervical cancer in low- and middle-income countries. We highly value our Unitaid partnership and have contributed more than half a billion pounds in funding.

The UK remains a major donor and champion of comprehensive sexual and reproductive health and rights to improve women's health. This includes continuing to support the Global Financing Facility (GFF), the Reproductive Health Supplies programme, UNFPA, and the Women's Integrated Sexual Health (WISH) and WISH Dividend programmes. The UK is one of the largest donors to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance who have immunised 16 million girls and averted 387,000 cervical cancer deaths over the last decade through HPV vaccination programmes.

Since 2019, the UK has committed up to £35.5 million towards the Supporting the Africa-Led Movement to End Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) programme. This includes funding to the UN Joint Programme for the Elimination of FGM. Since 2019 we have also funded £20 million towards the Sudan Free of FGM programme. The breakdown of these investments by year is in the table below. In addition, the FCDO funds several programmes on ending gender-based violence (GBV) that include FGM. In total FCDO spent £53.4 million on ending GBV in 2023, including FGM.

The UK is utilising our policy, programmatic and diplomatic levers to accelerate global efforts to end Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Since 2019, the UK has funded Phase II of the Africa Led Movement (ALM) to end FGM programme in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Senegal. ALM is working with activists, communities and grassroots organisations to harness evidence-based solutions to take end-FGM efforts to scale. The UK also funds the UN Joint Programme on the Elimination of FGM, to influence legislation, policy, and norm change efforts across 17 countries.

Women and children receive a disproportionate amount of online abuse and the exponential rise of AI has further exacerbated this threat. That is why tackling child sexual abuse and violence against women & girls (VAWG), including when these crimes take place online, remains a top priority for this government.

Under the Online Safety Act 2023, it is an offence to share or threaten to share intimate images without consent and this includes “deepfake” images. In September 2024, this Government made the sharing of intimate images without consent a ‘priority offence’ - the most serious class of online crime under the Online Safety Act. Companies in scope of the Act’s duties will now be required to proactively tackle this content on their platforms. This Government has also committed to banning the creation of sexually explicit “deepfake” images and is working at pace to identify a suitable legislative vehicle.

With regards to child sexual abuse imagery, UK law is very clear that it is an offence to produce, store, share or search for any material that contains or depicts child sexual abuse. This prohibition also includes pseudo-imagery that may have been generated by artificial intelligence. Possession of indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children carries a maximum sentence of 5 years’ imprisonment. In addition, the offence of taking, making, distribution and possession with a view to distribution of any indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child under 18 carries a maximum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment.

Technology companies, including those developing generative artificial intelligence products, have a duty to ensure their products are designed with robust guardrails in place that prevent them from being misused by offenders to create artificially generated child sexual abuse material. This Government is fully committed to tackling the creation of CSAM online and will use every lever possible to prevent it.