Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to provide sexual health services with an adequate level of funding.

No assessment of the impact of public health grant allocations on the level of funding for sexual health services is currently planned.

Since 2013, the Government has mandated local authorities in England to commission comprehensive open access to most sexual health services through the public health grant.

At the 2021 Spending Review we considered the need for local authority public health funding and confirmed that the public health grant to local authorities would increase over the settlement period. In 2023/24, the Grant increased by 3.3% to £3.529 billion, and will rise to £3.575 billion in 2024/25. It is for individual local authorities to decide their spending priorities based on an assessment of local need, including sexual health services, and to commission the service lines that best suit their population.