World AIDS Day
Chris Clarkson Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Nicola Richards). I welcome this debate and I thank the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) for bringing it to the House today. I also wish to praise him for his leadership in this area and for the work he has done to educate the public on the realities of people living with HIV. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of prejudices out there, and his speaking openly about his own experience as somebody living with HIV is incredibly powerful and important. When people see that their representatives are representative of society as a whole it makes a real difference. I will not speak at length, because we have heard a series of excellent speeches and I am going to use some of the same facts and figures that have been mentioned. However, I want to say how pleased I am that we are still having these debates, because this problem has not gone away.
The Government committed in December 2021 to achieve zero new HIV infections, HIV or AIDS-related deaths in England by 2030. That is an ambitious target, but I am sure everyone across this Chamber can agree it is essential. The framework for achieving that means ensuring equitable access to and uptake of HIV prevention programmes, scaling up testing in line with national guidelines, optimising rapid access to treatment and retention in care, improving the quality of life for people living with HIV and addressing the stigma surrounding infection and testing.
We must work to address the lazy stereotypes associated with HIV/AIDS, especially those surrounding the LGBT community. I am pleased to see that real progress is being made. The Government have provided £20 million to ensure that HIV opt-out testing is expanded to areas with a high prevalence, including Manchester, London, Blackpool—I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South (Scott Benton) for his dogged determination in getting Blackpool included—and Brighton. That has helped to reduce diagnosis times and improve diagnosis rates.
In Rochdale borough, where my Heywood and Middleton constituency is located, 2.2 in every 1,000 adults are living with HIV. I would particularly like to thank the teams at Middleton health centre and Heywood clinic for their work in providing sexual health testing and support, and I hope we will be able to take advantage of opt-out testing too, as it is essential. The roll-out of opt-out testing saw 128 people newly diagnosed with HIV, 325 people newly diagnosed with hepatitis B, as has been mentioned, and 153 people newly diagnosed with hepatitis C. At a cost of just £2.2 million across 100 days, the opt-out testing paid for itself, saving the NHS an estimated £6 million to 9 million, through early diagnosis and treatment. Opt-out testing also goes some way to addressing health inequalities, with higher proportions of women and people from black African and black Caribbean backgrounds being diagnosed compared with the national average.
In March 2020, the Department of Health and Social Care provided £16 million in funding to local authorities to provide PrEP. I warmly welcome that, but barriers still exist. More than 57% of people waited more than 12 weeks to access PrEP and only 35% who attempted to access PrEP services were successful. It is essential that that changes. PrEP is a game changer for all of us. It is an essential tool if we are to end new infections by the next decade in the UK.
Of course, we know that this is not just a problem here at home. The truth is that covid-19 was the second pandemic of our lifetimes and we are still living through the first; this is a global matter. That is why I am proud that the UK provides funds to UNAIDS, the Robert Carr Fund and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. I will join the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown in saying that I would have liked to have seen the levels sustained, but my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) made the important point that there are other things we can leverage as a country to help other countries in their fight against this disease. The UK is a co-founder of Global Fund and the third largest donor historically—my hon. Friend mentioned the figure of £4.4 billion in that regard—and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office announced on 14 November that the UK will contribute a further £1 billion, so at least we are still in the fight. As with covid, the truth is that none of us is safe until all of us are safe, and we have a role to play in supporting those parts of the world less able to tackle HIV/AIDS than ourselves.
As we aim for our 2030 target, I would also like to draw the Government’s attention to the recommendations of the Terrence Higgins Trust and National AIDS Trust, which are calling for the expansion of opt-out testing to all areas of high prevalence—I cannot stress how important that is—the provision of PrEP to all who could benefit from it, which is very important, and a refocusing of sexual health services that have been displaced by the recent mpox outbreak.
There is a huge amount of work to do if we are to reach our 2030 target, and that will rely on adequate funding, access and information across society. It will need those of us in this place to speak openly and honestly about HIV/AIDS and to be collaborative, working across the piece. I am confident that we can get to that 2030 target and I will continue to support everyone working to that endeavour for as long as I have the privilege to be in this place.
Oral Answers to Questions
Chris Clarkson Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Sajid Javid)
First, may I associate myself with your remarks, Mr Speaker, about the Falklands war as we remember those who lost their lives and their loved ones?
We are making good progress on tackling the covid-19 backlog, having already halved the number of patients with the longest waits and delivered more than a million tests and checks at our new community diagnostic centres. Our elective recovery plan commits an additional £8 billion to deliver approximately 30% more elective activity than before the pandemic, and we have ambitions to go further to transform services, improve patient care and ensure value for money.
Chris Clarkson
The cost of living is foremost on everybody’s minds now, so what assurances can my right hon. Friend give me that my constituents in Heywood and Middleton—a part of the world he knows very well—will get bang for their buck from the extra money they are paying into the NHS and that the money will go on testing and treatment, not management and miscellany?
Coronavirus
Chris Clarkson Excerpts(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)
Throughout, this process has been heartbreaking, debilitating and wearing, so to be here again talking about a further four-week extension is the worst possible outcome for so many of us—it is so, so disheartening. However, I say that knowing that I will be supporting the Government tonight. Unfortunately, my constituency neighbour the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) is no longer in his place, but he made an eloquent speech talking about why he could not support these measures on the grounds of civil liberties and I wanted to remind him that about a quarter of his seat is in the city of Salford, where I was a councillor for a while. The city’s motto is, “Salus populi suprema lex” or, “The welfare of the people is the highest law”. The infection rates in Greater Manchester are some of the highest in the entire country, with Manchester and Salford having the highest rates. His seat straddles those areas, so he cannot say that he is putting the welfare of the people in his constituency at the highest level.
I wish to turn to something that was brought up by the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) when she was talking about getting the politics out of this issue. I completely agree with that, which is why it was so frustrating yesterday that in the Manchester Evening News the lead member for health in Rochdale Borough Council was dismissing the vaccination programme as a gimmick and a slogan, and was hinting that the Government were withholding vaccines from certain areas. Anybody with the slightest idea about how logistics work knows that the programme is rate-limited purely by supply. I say to Members: we have four weeks to nail this down. We cannot have another extension. We cannot keep going through this process. We are going to have to work together. We are going to have stop sniping at each other and trying to make little jibes to score a little point here or there. There are people who are depending on us to do the right thing now.
Covid-19
Chris Clarkson Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am sure that colleagues will be delighted to know that my time has been shortened to four minutes.
First, I join colleagues across the House in thanking the great British public, including my constituents in Heywood and Middleton, for their continued forbearance, patience and public spirit as the pandemic wears on. After months of sacrifice, it would be nice to be able to say to them, “Mission accomplished. Job well done.”, but we cannot and nor can any country, even those that the Opposition and their army of amateur epidemiologists on social media were holding up as examples at the beginning of the crisis. We must redouble our efforts, unbowed and unbroken. The same blitz spirit that saw Britain and the Commonwealth through world war two is still alive and well. It is in every one of the acts of kindness that I spoke of in my maiden speech. It is in people such as Michelle Eagleton and Clare Cartmel in Middleton, who planned a community spirit award to pay tribute to their neighbours who went the extra mile during lockdown, and in people such as Sue Coates and Annie Cooney of Heywood magic market who welcomed freelancers and sole traders to the market for just £28 a week, so that they could continue to earn a living through the crisis.
People in my communities know better than most how tough it is to endure long periods of restrictions. For weeks now, our infection rates have gone up by hundreds of thousands. Heywood and Middleton, Bamford, Castleton and Norden, along with much of Greater Manchester, have been under additional measures as we try to get control of the virus. For the most part, people have just got on with it. I am not saying that the rules have been enthusiastically welcomed. I am not sure that anyone would expect them to be, but people have got on with it. That is what we do in the north: we crack on.
We may soon be asked to vote on an amendment in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Sir Graham Brady). Sir Graham is well liked and well respected, not just in this place but across Greater Manchester, so when I say that I shall not be supporting the amendment, I say it believing that it is the wrong approach and not as a judgment on the hon. Gentlemen bringing forward the motion.
This country is facing an emergency. Even the most libertarian of us, and I count myself as such, have to recognise that, on occasion, the Executive must be given room to manoeuvre to make decisions in the moment. We already have checks, balances and safety mechanisms in place to ensure that decisions are appropriate and proportionate. What the amendment proposes is the equivalent of the House of Commons making Churchill come here to take a vote every time he wanted to send out Spitfires. It ignores the reality of the situation to satiate an ideological predilection and I cannot support that.
What if Parliament comes to the conclusion that the Coronavirus Act 2020 should not be extended, or that it should be watered down? It is a possibility, after all. There will be a caucus of politicians with one eye on the polls, telling those justifiably angry people who email us about their liberties that everything can go back to normal at the click of a finger. That would be hugely popular—it absolutely would—but the truth is that it would be like telling somebody to take their parachute off at 200 feet because the job of slowing their descent has already been done. It will, of course, be up to hon. Members as to how they vote when or if this amendment comes forward. I suspect that I will not have changed that many minds tonight.
Before coming here, I spent eight years as that rarest of the rare—a Tory member of Salford Council. The city’s motto is rather ironically a quotation from one of the great Conservative thinkers, Marcus Tullius Cicero, “Salus populi suprema lex”, which means the welfare of the people is the highest law. I urge Members across the House to keep that in mind as they choose what to do later this week.