Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps her Department has taken to encourage people to be tested for HIV.

The HIV Action Plan is the cornerstone of our approach to drive forward progress and achieve our goal of ending 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 through testing.

As part of the HIV Action Plan, the Department is investing over £4.5 million from 2021 to 2025 to deliver the HIV Prevention Programme, a nationally co-ordinated programme of HIV prevention work that is designed to complement locally commissioned prevention activities, in areas of high HIV prevalence and for communities at risk of HIV transmission. The programme also aims to improve knowledge and understanding of HIV transmission and reduce stigma within affected communities through the delivery of public campaigns such as National HIV Testing Week, and evidence-based HIV prevention interventions in partnership with local organisations and charities. During National HIV Testing Week this year, we dispatched over 24,000 kits.

As an additional part of the HIV Action Plan, NHS England has expanded opt-out HIV testing in 34 emergency departments in local areas in England with extremely high HIV prevalence and the whole of London, including some areas with high HIV prevalence. This programme began in 2022 and is funded by NHS England, with £20 million until the end of March 2025. In the first 21 months, the programme has preliminarily identified 685 people newly diagnosed with HIV, and 384 people previously diagnosed with HIV but not in care.

Given the success of the programme, the Department has committed an additional £20 million for new research, which will involve an expansion and evaluation of opt-out blood borne virus testing, including for HIV, in 47 additional emergency departments in local areas with high HIV prevalence across England. Funding will support 12 months of testing for each emergency department, to begin in April 2024, although it is at the discretion of individual sites when the testing will commence.