National HIV Testing Week

Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts

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.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Preet Kaur Gill]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his remarks, which he has now put on the record.

There were 13% fewer people tested for HIV in 2022 than in 2019. That is why we have seen cross-party support today for National HIV Testing Week. Testing is free, quick and easy. You can even test from home, and you can order a free test online; I urge colleagues to share that information with their constituents.

Turning to what the Government can do to help eradicate new transmissions of HIV, I was very pleased to see the Government finally commit to rolling out opt-out testing to all 32 areas of high HIV prevalence in England. The pilots have been a resounding success, and Labour has fully supported bringing them to other high-risk communities across England. The shadow Health Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), was on the HIV Commission that first made the recommendations. Will the Minister provide an update on progress towards rolling out the programme to the 47 new hospitals? Can she provide reassurance that in the long term, opt-out testing in emergency departments will be embedded as a cornerstone of the UK’s plan to end new HIV transmissions? Receiving an HIV diagnosis can be alarming, especially if you are not expecting it, so has she considered setting aside a portion of funding to ensure that people who are diagnosed through the scheme are given support to help them to come to terms with their diagnosis? Has she made an assessment of whether opt-out testing could be rolled out to other settings in primary care?

The Minister will know that the HIV action plan included several commitments on HIV testing, including the commitment that local authority commissioners would set the standard that sexual health services would achieve a 90% testing offer rate to first-time attendees. Two years on from the publication of the plan, there has been no reporting on its progress. Will the Minister say what progress the Government have made against commitments in the HIV action plan to increase the number of people tested in sexual health services?

Finally, I want to ask the Minister about the Government’s commitment to the prevention agenda. Under the Government, we have widening health inequalities, life expectancy stalling, and a record high of 2.8 million people out of the workforce due to ill health. Any Government interested in supporting the NHS would put prevention front and centre of their agenda, but for 14 years, there has been no joined-up plan for health, and services and institutions that promote good health have been run down. This week we heard that England’s national public health agency, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, has been “effectively dismantled”. OHID leads on sexual and reproductive health and HIV, as well as a wide range of public health issues, ranging from tobacco to obesity and children’s health. Will the Minister explain how the Government can be committed to the prevention agenda when they are dismantling our national public health function? Will she do us the courtesy of confirming how many full-time equivalent staff have been cut from OHID, and can she explain why the Government have not had the courtesy to make a statement to Parliament on what has been reported, which sounds like quite significant cuts?

The remarkable progress on HIV has been hard won, and it puts ending new cases of HIV within reach. We have only one Parliament left to do that by 2030. I want to put on record clearly that Labour is committed to getting us over the line. That is why we would immediately get to work publishing a refreshed HIV action plan. It will not be easy, but we know what it will take. We owe it to everyone we have lost to the virus, everyone who has faced that stigma, and everyone who is living with HIV today to end new transmissions once and for all.