Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the correlation between reductions in public health funding and increases in rates of syphilis and gonorrhoea.

Increases in rates of syphilis and gonorrhoea are likely to be due to a number of factors. These include increases in both the number of people attending sexual health services and the number of tests for sexually transmitted infections. Public Health England has advised that other factors include, better detection of infections and behavioural changes such as an increase in partner numbers and condomless anal intercourse, as well as, for some men who have sex with men, ‘chemsex’ and group sex facilitated by geosocial networking applications.