Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to achieve gender parity in their HIV response, to ensure there is equitable (1) investment, (2) priority, and (3) attention, to women in HIV (a) prevention, (b) research, (c) data, and (d) services, in the UK.

Ensuring everyone benefits equally from HIV developments is the cornerstone of our approach in England to achieve our ambitions to end new HIV transmissions, AIDS- and HIV-related deaths by 2030, as set out in our HIV Action Plan, available in an online-only format.

As part of the Plan, NHS England is investing £20 million from 2022-2025 to support the expansion of opt-out HIV testing in emergency departments in local authority areas with extremely high prevalence of HIV. We are also investing more than £3.5 million from 2021-2024 to deliver the National HIV Prevention Programme which supports communities who are disproportionately affected by HIV, including black African heterosexual women.

The UK Health Security Agency published a HIV Action Plan monitoring and evaluation report in 2022, which tracks progress across priority actions and identifies further efforts needed across the system to improve equitable access to HIV services for key population groups, including women. We continue working together with our delivery partners to ensure equity in prevention, treatment, and HIV care, and we are developing a plan to improve equitable access to the HIV prevention drug PrEP for key groups, including women.

Local authorities in England are responsible for commissioning comprehensive open access to most sexual and reproductive health services, including HIV prevention, testing and access to PrEP, through the Public Health Grant, funded at £3.5 billion in 2023-24.  It is for individual local authorities to decide their spending priorities based on an assessment of local need and to commission the service lines that best suit their population.

The Department also funds research through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), which recently published an equality, diversity and inclusion strategy, setting out how NIHR will become a more inclusive funder of research and widen access to participation, including for women.