HIV Testing Week

Siân Berry Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship for the second time this week, Dr Allin-Khan. I thank the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) and the co-chairs of the APPG for all the work that they do.

I also echo calls from hon. Members for the funding for global work that is being shamefully cut back by the new US Government to be found from within this country. I ask the Minister to look at the pressure that is also being put on, and the funding that is being withdrawn from, wider rights-based groups, which we spoke to yesterday in a fantastic and interesting roundtable. There are many groups working in the global south to support LGBT rights and reproductive rights, which include healthcare. The impact of the cutback more widely will be on health, and we owe it to those groups to ensure that we are doing what we can to make up for what the American Government are so awfully doing.

I am pleased to join this important debate and to support HIV testing week. I absolutely commend the efforts being made by so many MPs, including the Prime Minister, to promote HIV testing. That is great to see. As an MP for Brighton, I am proud of the work of the Terrence Higgins Trust—which is partly based in my constituency, not far from my office—for making this a bigger event every year, and more and more inclusive. I recently visited THT to see first-hand the incredible work it is doing to end new transmissions of HIV, supporting people to live well with HIV, and challenging the stigma and all the things that go around that. Its work with partners in my city, like the pioneering Lawson unit at the Royal Sussex County hospital and the local HIV charity, the Sussex Beacon, is all so exciting.

Opt-out testing was mentioned. The emergency department at the Royal Sussex has been doing that testing since March 2022. It has since been rolled out nationally in areas of very high HIV prevalence. In Brighton, the team at the Lawson clinic has identified 16 new HIV diagnoses in recent years. That sounds like a small number, but the impact for each individual is absolutely massive. They are all people whose HIV will almost certainly have gone undetected up until then. All the work that is being done to normalise testing as part of a trip to A&E, when blood is drawn, does so much to reduce HIV stigma, help people, and save and improve lives.

Brighton also has some groundbreaking digital pathway work happening. The locally co-designed HIV app EmERGE has been a big success. It is a European project centred in Brighton, and I am told that people absolutely love it. There are about 720 people using it for PrEP access, appointments and support. This innovative approach has helped ease the pressure on local services and freed up about 1,000 local appointments per year. That is fantastic work, making all our money go further and helping people to cut their transmission risk without fuss and bother. That is what we all need to be working towards.

Let us be clear: zero transmission of HIV is possible by the target date of 2030. The work in Brighton that I have just described proves that. I truly believe that Brighton could be the first place in the UK to achieve that target, given the comprehensive work going on. I know that hon. Members in the Chamber are aware of all of that, and I hope the Minister will set out how a roll-out of that model across the UK will be funded.

[Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (in the Chair)]

In order to get all Members to speak in this important debate, I gently suggest a time limit of three and a half minutes.

Puberty-suppressing Hormones

Siân Berry Excerpts

Wednesday 11th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I am certainly happy to continue meeting my hon. Friend on this issue. With great respect to the Council of Europe and the authors of the report that she mentions, I have to take decisions about the welfare, wellbeing and safety of children in this country based on clinical evidence. When our own Commission on Human Medicines says that there is an “unacceptable safety risk” and an unsafe prescribing environment, I have to take that seriously. When one of our country’s leading paediatricians says that there is insufficient evidence about the long-term effects of the use of this particular drug for this particular purpose for this particular cohort of children and young people, I have to take that seriously.

I know there are people who will be deeply disappointed by this decision, including many trans people and their families. Thinking about some of the young people I have met in recent weeks and months, I have taken to heart what they have said, and I know this will be deeply upsetting to them. I do not take that lightly, but to anyone challenging me to do something else, I ask them quite sincerely whether if they were standing in my shoes as the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, looking at recommendations from clinicians in our country—including the Commission on Human Medicines—saying that there is insufficient evidence for the use of medication in children and young people for this purpose and an unacceptable safety risk arising from the current prescribing environment, they would really take a different position.

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I am extremely worried and fearful about this decision to continue the blanket ban, and I want to ask the Secretary of State about his reliance in the terms of reference and reasons for this decision on the purpose for which these drugs are being prescribed—that is, being trans—when they are safely used by young people for other conditions, as he acknowledges. Does he understand that this is, at heart, discriminatory?

[Wes Streeting]

I do not agree with the hon. Member’s characterisation. A whole range of medicines are prescribed for a whole range of uses among a whole range of patient cohorts that may well be unsafe, inappropriate or ineffective for use by other patients with other conditions. That is a basic fact of medicine and, if I may say so, the hon. Member’s intervention is why we should listen to clinicians, not politicians.

Medicines

Siân Berry Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

Alongside hon. Members who have spoken on behalf of other parties, I welcome the changes. Naloxone saves lives: it brings people back from one of the most final and, in many cases, fatal mistakes they can make.

This is a really important change to make, but I hope that the regulations will be kept more closely and continuously under review, rather than us just coming back to the topic in two years’ time, as is mandated. Drugs policy must be evidence-led. As we see the benefits, hopefully quickly, of wider access and of more people having naloxone available in their work, it might be a good idea to see whether we can widen access any further.

I have been reading the careful, evidence-based and considered responses from a range of different charities, including Release. It seems that there are quite a few groups of workers who ought to be able to use the first route—the expanded definition of workers who can easily access and use the drug—rather than the second route, under which they access it not directly but via a separately accredited provider of naloxone. As Release says, one of the simpler ways to achieve that might be to make it a pharmacy-available drug rather than a prescription drug, with some exceptions, as we have now.

I do not want to say, “Don’t do this”; I am saying, “Do it, then review it and go further if you can.” Many groups of workers will have the experience of unexpectedly meeting people who are going through overdose more often than others will in their daily work. There are now also more people working with those who will unexpectedly be going through overdose because of the wider prevalence of synthetic opioids and the other routes to becoming a victim of opioid overdose. They include student welfare workers, youth workers who are not necessarily involved in youth justice, local councillors potentially, night-time venue staff, transport workers, who are not currently on the list, street cleaners and park workers. Once we see the benefits of wider groups being able to access naloxone easily, it may become obvious that some of these other groups ought to be trained and given simple access—potentially through pharmacies to anyone who asks.

This is not to quibble. I am obviously restating quite a lot of what was said in the consultation. I hope that we continue to look at the evidence and expand this as quickly as possible. Every life that we could save, we should save. The harm that could be done is minimal in comparison.