Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they will take to ensure that women have control over their sexual and reproductive health decisions through empowering them to (1) negotiate condom use, (2) access pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and (3) make informed choices to prevent HIV transmission.

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 underserved populations benefit equally from improvements made in HIV outcomes, including marginalised women. This includes scaling up HIV testing in targeted, high-risk populations and increasing equitable access to and use of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).

Initial analysis recently published by the UK Health Security Agency show that HIV opt-out testing in emergency departments in local authority areas with extremely high HIV prevalence has been particularly successful at reaching women with HIV testing. The HIV Action Plan Implementation Steering Group is developing a roadmap to help guide our efforts to improve equitable access, uptake and use of PrEP to meet the needs of key populations at significant risk of HIV, including heterosexual and transgender women, which is expected to be made available by the end of the year.

HIV Prevention England delivers a nationally co-ordinated programme of HIV prevention work designed to complement locally commissioned HIV prevention in areas with high HIV prevalence and for communities at risk of HIV transmission, with a particular focus on women, and includes the promotion of evidence-based HIV prevention interventions such as condom use.