National HIV Testing Week

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

At the conclusion of the debate, I am going to take an HIV test. I do not expect it to have a surprising result, but I think that unless people like me set an example, we cannot expect others to overcome what might be embarrassment or awkwardness. The same applies to things like giving blood, which I did again this morning, for over the 90th time. If people watched blood being taken, they would be less fearful about giving blood themselves, and if they knew that they could take HIV tests without embarrassment, they would do so.

Each year, about 3 million of us go to sexual health clinics, where there are a lot of acronyms—STIs, STDs, GUM, HIV and AIDS—that all follow from things like blood being given. The first person in my family to take an HIV test was my mother, who had had a number of blood units given to her after an operation and wondered whether she was infected and might infect others in the family. She was clear; many were not so fortunate.

On vectors—person-to-person transmissions—we ought to be far more open, because the only thing we cannot inherit from our parents is celibacy. Celibacy can be adopted or forced on someone, but sex is quite common for the rest of us. On that, I am glad that we now have a vaccination against genital warts, which is included in the cervical cancer vaccination and is now available to young men and boys as well. We will reach herd immunity much faster if both sexes are involved. That also gives protection to men who have sex with men.

I am not an expert on all these things, but we ought to be as careful about this as we are about ensuring that people’s teeth are protected, as we discussed yesterday in the dentistry statement. We should be concerned that the chances of being involved in a conception that ends in a formal termination are about 50% in this country. There is a birth cohort of just over 600,000, and there are over 200,000 abortions a year—the maths is not complicated.

It takes two to tango. As the hon. Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) said in her remarkable, positive and important speech, we can end HIV transmission if, when people know that they have been exposed to it, they can get treatment for it.

There is no reason for a long debate, or even a long speech from someone like me. I simply say, in solidarity with the people we can protect, that we ought to know our own status, encourage others to find ways of discovering their status and make sure that help is available and offered.

It is odd that, often, when people come into contact with clinical services, they are not encouraged to discover their status in all kinds of ways. Modern treatments are available and they are effective. If we can overcome the embarrassment, we can get to a situation where people can be themselves and live as they choose, without being a risk to themselves or to others. I thank the hon. Lady again for her speech, and I hope that the whole country will pay attention.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.”