National HIV Testing Week

Debate between Preet Kaur Gill and Peter Bottomley

Thursday 8th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a great pleasure to speak for the Opposition in this debate to mark National HIV Testing Week. We have heard great contributions today from Members on both sides of the House, and it gives me hope that we can continue to make progress on this issue in the years ahead. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols), the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) for making powerful speeches on the enormous progress made on HIV.

Incredible advances mean that people living with HIV on effective treatment can now enjoy normal life expectancy and are no longer at risk of passing on the virus. The reality of living with HIV in the 2020s is a world away from the 1980s. As colleagues have remarked today, we might just have the chance to be the generation to make Britain the first country in the world to end new cases of HIV for good. It is an enormous credit to a generation of activists, fantastic organisations such as the Terrence Higgins Trust, many great campaigning MPs across the House and the all-party parliamentary group on HIV and AIDS that we have got to this point. More treatments have become available. Thousands of people are now living with HIV at levels undetectable or intransmissible to others, and the stigma and misinformation that the LGBT+ community suffered through the ’80s is not what it was.

For Labour’s part, we are incredibly proud of our record on HIV. It was the last Labour Government who switched spending so people could get the new drugs as they became available after 1997. We passed the Equality Act in 2010 that gave legal protections to people living with HIV. Chris Smith became the first MP to talk about living with HIV in 2005, and in 2018 my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) was the first MP to talk about living with HIV here in the Commons. But there is much more to be done.

There are around 4,500 people in the UK living with HIV who are undiagnosed. The earlier those people can be found and linked to care, the better their health outcomes will be and the closer we will be to stopping new transmissions. Some 44% of people diagnosed with HIV in England last year were diagnosed at a late stage. Late diagnosis rates are even higher for women, at 51%, and that means some women are diagnosed so late they are already on their death beds.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I am glad the hon. Lady is making the important point that women are particularly at risk of non-diagnosis. She rightly mentions some Labour people who made important contributions. We ought to remember Norman Fowler. I do not normally talk about my wife’s work, but if I may say so, when she was Secretary of State for Health, she got the insurance companies in and said, “Do not charge higher premiums, or refuse cover to, people who have taken an HIV test. That is not the way to move forward.”