Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to encourage (a) research and (b) targeted interventions into factors driving HIV transmission within the black community.

The HIV Action Plan is the cornerstone of our approach in England to drive forward progress and achieve our goal to end new HIV transmissions, AIDS and HIV-related deaths within England by 2030. A key principle of our approach is to ensure that all populations benefit equally from improvements made in HIV outcomes, including black communities.

The UK Health Security Agency publishes a yearly monitoring and evaluation report, which sets out key indicators to track progress towards our ambitions in the HIV Action Plan, including by ethnicity, and these data help us to understand where services can be improved and made more accessible to key populations. The next report will be published on 1 December 2023.

The Department commissions HIV prevention interventions through our national HIV prevention programme, including targeted work with black African communities, and commission research through the National Institute for Health and Care Research, which welcomes funding applications for research into any aspect of human health.