World AIDS Day

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Neil O'Brien)]

Let me start by congratulating all Members from across the House who have taken part in what has been an incredibly informative and high quality debate. Let me join others in congratulating the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle), on a speech that mixed huge personal experience and knowledge, years of advocacy and successful campaigning, and a huge number of insights.

I undertake to look at numerous issues raised by the hon. Member, but to pick just a few, he asked about: the bureaucratic barriers stopping syphilis testing from being added to the opt-out testing that we already do for HIV and hepatitis B and C; some of the risks around the shift to online clinics; people on PrEP being tested regularly; and the promising experiment by the Terrence Higgins Trust with saliva testing for HIV. He raised a number of other points, including the important issue about patent waivers. There was a huge amount in his speech to take away and look at.

The same is true of other hon. Members. My right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) made hugely important points about women and girls, and gave some incredibly striking and harrowing statistics. She made important points about the barriers to testing, particularly among minority groups. We can learn from the way that we are tackling that problem in other fields, including in covid vaccination work.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) gave us insights on what is happening in Northern Ireland, such as the role of the Public Health Agency there and what it is doing on PrEP. He talked about the role of the church in his constituency and the connection between Swaziland and Strangford, which might surprise outsiders. He talked of the work of the Positive Life charity in Northern Ireland, which I commend.

My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Nicola Richards) spoke powerfully about her constituents’ experiences of stigma. She made the important point that, as a high prevalence area, it should be considered for the expansion of opt-out testing. A similar point was made by the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) and my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Chris Clarkson). I join my hon. Friend in commending the work of Middleton Health Centre.

The hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Steven Bonnar) talked about some important lessons that we can learn. We are keen to learn across the UK about the rollout of PrEP in Scotland. On the roll-out of our world-leading vaccination campaign against mpox—one of many issues raised by the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) in his speech—we are talking to that relatively small number of clinics that have had to deliver the huge majority of the campaign about its impact financially and on their day-to-day work.

World AIDS Day is an invitation to underline our commitment to tackling HIV, to show our support for people living with HIV and to remember those we have lost to AIDS. I am proud of how far we have come: from the stigma and the sidelining of the past, which a number of Members have mentioned, to where we are today thanks to collaborative efforts and the commitment of the Government, together with HIV patients, their friends and family, campaigners, medics, researchers and the health and care system at all levels.

Today, when diagnosed early and with access to antiretroviral therapy, most people living with HIV in England can expect a near-normal life expectancy. People diagnosed with HIV can expect to receive world-class, free and open-access HIV care. That has been a result of our collective and collaborative partnerships. However, despite successes, HIV has not gone away. There is still more that we should do. That is why last year, this Government published their commitment to end new HIV transmissions in England by 2030 through the HIV action plan. That plan is the cornerstone of our approach in England to drive forward progress and achieve our bold ambitions.

We have come far in the first year since its publication. The UK met the UNAIDS 95-95-95 targets for the first time in 2020: 95% of HIV-positive individuals were diagnosed; 99% of those diagnosed were receiving treatment; and 97% of those receiving treatment were being virally suppressed. I am pleased that the number of people being newly diagnosed with HIV in England continues to fall. The latest data on HIV diagnoses shows that 2,955 people were diagnosed with HIV in England in 2021—a 33% decline compared with 2019, when the Government first made their commitment to end all new HIV transmissions in England by 2030. We are conscious of the need to avoid flatlining or slowing the pace in any way. We are still understanding the impact of the covid pandemic and the things that happened during that period, but there has been progress.

Those successes have been underpinned by clear national leadership and strengthened partnership working. I am grateful to Professor Kevin Fenton, the Government’s chief adviser on HIV, who has been chairing the HIV action plan implementation steering group, involving the key partners in the delivery of the HIV action plan, including local government, the NHS, and our voluntary and community sector. The steering group has met quarterly throughout the year to monitor progress on our commitments and ensure that appropriate action was taken to keep us moving forward with our objectives. Within the remit of the group, they have established specific task and finish groups focusing on key priority areas for action, such as improving equity and access to HIV drug prevention—PrEP—and addressing workforce challenges, among others.

We are also thankful for the work of the UK Health Security Agency, which excels as a world-class leader running high-quality data collection and surveillance systems to help us to better understand and address the challenges on HIV. Those have enabled us to truly understand developments, emerging issues and where we can have the greatest impact with our prevention efforts, and add to our growing repertoire of world-leading British innovation, systems and technology.

Of course, none of this could have been possible without the brilliant efforts of our local government, NHS and voluntary and community sector partners to deliver the highest-quality healthcare tailored to the needs of their local populations. We know through their work that different areas face different challenges, and we remain committed to helping level up outcomes for the whole population across the country.

A key priority, therefore, of the Government’s approach is to ensure that all under-served populations benefit equally from improvements in HIV outcomes. A range of important suggestions have been made in this debate about how to go further. The approach includes scaling up our prevention efforts and increasing access to PrEP. We have already invested £33 million to roll out PrEP access across sexual health services over the past two years. PrEP is now being commissioned as a routine service through the public health grant.

In delivering against these commitments, UKHSA has now developed and published a monitoring and evaluation framework to support local authorities, sexual health services and other key stakeholders to inform continuous service development in PrEP commissioning and delivery, using the existing available data. I am sure many of the people involved in delivery of those services will have followed this debate with great interest and noted some of the challenges posed by different hon. Members.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

One of the problems is that the Department does not collate data on the average wait times for sexual health clinics or the availability of stocks for PrEP appointments in those clinics. Without that data, we rely on voluntary organisations to make freedom of information requests and report periodically. Having a baseline set from the Department would make a big difference and help us to understand areas that are struggling to roll out PrEP versus areas that maybe are not. Is that something the Minister could take back to the Department? I understand why in the past we have been nervous about publishing data on sexual health issues, but now is the time when we can be a bit more open about that and maybe publish that data, or collate it if that is not already done, so we can start to target our actions.

[Neil O'Brien]

That is certainly something I will take away and look at. As the hon. Gentleman points out, there are a number of challenges in doing that and in unpicking the activities of sexual health services on different diseases, and he has already alluded to some of the risks. However, I will certainly undertake to go away and look at that important point.

We know there is still more to do to improve PrEP access for key groups and we are in the process of developing a plan for provision of PrEP in settings beyond sexual and reproductive health services, to help us to reach those who are underrepresented—something a number of hon. Members have called for. Our efforts are also focused on scaling and improving testing levels in targeted, high-risk populations, including in black African communities, to be able to reach those 4,500 individuals who we believe are living with HIV but unaware of their status.

As part of implementation of the action plan, NHS England is investing £20 million over the next three years to expand opt-out HIV testing in A&E departments in the local authority areas across the country with the highest prevalence of HIV and across the whole of London. As a number of hon. Members have pointed out, it is a proven effective way to identify new HIV cases, as it promotes testing on admission to hospital of anyone who has not previously been diagnosed with HIV, therefore rapidly helping to identify the virus. Some 33 A&E departments are now live, delivering that important initiative.

We also took the opportunity to link the initiative to the hepatitis C elimination programme, backed by a further £6.85 million, to provide hepatitis B and C testing as well. As several hon. Members alluded to, NHSE published its report on the first 100 days yesterday, describing the progress, challenges, results and learning from the first period of this initiative.

Those very early findings show the benefits of the approach: more than 200,000 HIV tests were conducted over just the first 100 days of opt-out testing across London, Manchester, Salford, Blackpool and Brighton, which meant that more than 600 people were identified with a previously unknown blood-borne virus. Of those, 128 people were newly identified as living with HIV and an additional 65 people living with HIV who were previously diagnosed but were not under the care of an HIV clinic were also identified.

This approach is important to ensure everyone living with HIV can access testing and rapid linkage to treatment and care, allowing them to live a long and healthy life. Moreover, 325 people were newly identified with hepatitis B and 153 people were newly identified with chronic hepatitis C virus; a further 50 were found who had disengaged from care for both diseases and seven people were identified who had previously cleared the hepatitis C virus.

We will be considering the initial evidence from the first year of testing alongside the data on progress towards our ambitions to decide how and whether we further expand this programme. We are in the very early days of evidence on this, but I must say that evidence is extremely encouraging. I hear what hon. Members across the House are calling for, given the success of that programme in its first 100 days, but we need further evidence as it develops.

We redoubled our efforts to increase HIV testing throughout the country during National HIV Testing Week, which took place in February this year. Results are promising: 30% of the almost 25,000 users who ordered an HIV and syphilis self-sampling kit during the campaign had never tested before, and a majority of the campaign’s target audiences reported having taken some kind of preventative action as a result of the campaign.

We know there is still more we need to do to achieve our ambitions. The HIV action plan monitoring and evaluation framework developed by UKHSA, published today, will explore in detail the inequalities and gaps in HIV prevention, testing and care and other indicators of the progress required to achieve our shared ambitions and will help inform our progress. Our actions continue to be closely monitored by the HIV action plan implementation steering group, which includes key delivery partners such as local government, the NHS and the voluntary and community sector, to ensure we remain on track to meet the 2025 and 2030 objectives. The Secretary of State will report annually to Parliament on progress towards our objectives.

World Aids Day gives us the chance to reflect on progress and challenges, being accountable for what we have done over the past year and where we need to continue improving. But, most importantly, it gives us the possibility of coming together to restate our collective commitment to continue working together to end new HIV transmissions in England by 2030 and to finish the race.