Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department is taking steps to ensure that (a) access to and (b) uptake of (i) PrEP and (ii) other HIV preventative measures is equitable across different groups.

As part of our HIV Action Plan implementation, we are working together with key stakeholders to improve access to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention drug pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for key population groups. The HIV Action Plan Implementation Steering Group is working to develop a roadmap, based on the PrEP Access and Equity Task and Finish group’s recommendations, to help guide our efforts to ensure access, uptake, and use of PrEP meets the needs of groups most at risk of HIV.

HIV PrEP is routinely available in specialist sexual health services throughout the country since March 2020 and we invested more than £34 million in PrEP in 2020/21 and 2021/22. PrEP funding has been fully included within the public health grant since 2022/23 and funds appointments and testing in sexual health services, whilst NHS England covers the costs of the drug itself.

As part of the HIV Action Plan and our combination approach to HIV prevention, we are investing £3.5 million over 2021 to 2024 in HIV Prevention England, a national HIV prevention programme targeting key population groups with a high burden of HIV. NHS England has committed £20 million, 2022 to 2025, to fund the expansion of HIV opt-out testing in emergency departments in areas with extremely high HIV prevalence, which has helped find more than 550 cases of undiagnosed or untreated HIV in the first year of the programme. Treatment as prevention is a key HIV prevention measure and treatment coverage in England remained high in 2021 at 99% and was consistent across all groups.