Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to help raise awareness of cervical cancer; and whether he is taking steps with the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs to help raise awareness of cervical cancer in other countries.

Answered by Andrew Gwynne

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.

Department of Health and Social Care officials work closely with colleagues in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to raise awareness of cervical cancer in lower and middle income countries. For example, the Government has committed £1.65 billion to Gavi from 2021 to 2025, which provides the human papillomavirus vaccine to help protect the most vulnerable girls from the leading cause of cervical cancer.

Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what recent assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of UK funding for UNITAID on the cost of HPV testing in (a) low and (b) middle-income countries.

Answered by Anneliese Dodds - Minister of State (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)

Unitaid are a leading funder of innovative tools to find and treat cervical cancer in low- and middle-income countries, with HPV tests the most accurate way to identify if a woman is at higher risk of developing cervical cancer. Together with partners, Unitaid's interventions lowered the cost of HPV testing by nearly 40 per cent and reduced the price of portable thermal ablation devices for treating precancerous lesions by more than 45 per cent. Unitaid's work is laying the groundwork for national cervical cancer elimination programs worldwide. We highly value our Unitaid partnership and have contributed more than half a billion pounds in funding.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to (a) reduce the sex and gender gap in participants for (i) healthcare research and (ii) clinical trials and (b) ensure that sex and gender dimensions are accounted for in the development of medical (A) treatments and (B) interventions.

Answered by Ashley Dalton - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

The Department funds health and care research primarily through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). The NIHR has made research inclusion a condition of its funding. Applicants to domestic research programmes are required to demonstrate how inclusion is being built into all stages of the research lifecycle, with significant emphasis on how participant selection is considered. Before the end of March 2026, this will also be required for global health research and infrastructure awards.

The NIHR is developing a sex and gender policy to be implemented subsequently in 2025, to ensure that NIHR research accounts for sex and gender across every stage of the research cycle, allowing for a greater understanding of how men and women might be impacted differently by the same health condition, treatment, or intervention.

The Department is also developing a new research and development innovation strategy to accelerate the development of equitable, transformational medical technology solutions. Part of the aims of this work are to eliminate sex bias in medical technology research and development, ensuring that innovations are effective and accessible for all.

Early detection of heart valve disease

Cash acceptance

120th anniversary of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary

Israel’s military presence in the West Bank

Proposals to forcibly displace and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza

Yorkshire Cancer Research's 100th anniversary

Found: Darlington Mrs Sarah Russell Barry Gardiner Jayne Kirkham Louise Haigh Samantha Niblett Gill Furniss

Found: Chairs: Gill Furniss, Mr David Mundell Clerks: Chris Watson and Claire Cozens 4 February 2025

When a division is called in the House of Commons, Members present on the Estate who wish to cast a vote must then proceed to the division lobbies located adjacent to the Chamber to do so.  During the Covid-19 pandemic, due to social distancing requirements, Members were able to vote electronically in some divisions in the House (then known as ‘remote voting’),  but these arrangements lapsed in mid-2021 alongside other pandemic-era procedures. Several other legislatures around the world – including the House of Lords – currently operate some form of electronic voting arrangements, therefore providing different models that could be compared to those in the House of Commons which require a physical presence in a certain location for a valid vote to be cast.