Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of adequacy of his Department's funding for the eradication of tuberculosis.

The Government has been active in tackling tuberculosis (TB) in the United Kingdom and in 2015 launched ‘The Collaborative TB Strategy for England’ which set out 10 key ‘areas for action’ to reduce TB incidence. This ambitious plan sets out how the Department aims to better treat, prevent and control tuberculosis in England. The plan’s objectives do not include eradication and thus we have not made a specific assessment on the funding required to do so.

As part of the Collaborative TB Strategy 2015-2020, jointly developed by NHS England and Public Health England, NHS England funded clinical commissioning groups that have high TB incidence and/or high TB burden to offer latent TB testing and treatment to new entrants (i.e. within the past five years) to the UK who have come from countries with a TB incidence of equal or under 150 per 100,000 population or from sub-Saharan Africa.

The strategy aims to achieve a year-on-year decrease in cases of TB, a reduction in health inequalities and the elimination of TB as a public health problem in England. The strategy is successfully delivering a decline in TB cases in England where in 2017 there were just over 5,000 new cases of TB in England; a decline of almost 40% since 2011. This shows that the measures we have funded and put in place have had a real impact with the rate of TB in the UK being the lowest it has been for 30 years.