Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy to introduce a sexual health strategy; and ensure adequate funding is in place to help reduce sexually transmitted infections.

We are committed to improving sexual heath in England and have published our HIV Action Plan in 2021 which sets out our ambitions and actions to achieve no new HIV transmission in England by 2030. Great progress has been made during the first year of its implementation, as set out by the annual report to Parliament published on 7 June, and we are considering the next steps needed to continue improving the sexual health of the whole population.

As part of this plan, we are investing more than £3.5 million from 2021 to 2024 to deliver the National HIV Prevention Programme for England, including National HIV Testing Week and other campaigns to improve information and testing for HIV and other STIs.

Sexual health services (SHSs) play a key public health role in diagnosis, early treatment and management of STIs and we are providing more than £3.5 billion to local authorities through the public health grant to fund public health services, including SHSs, in this financial year. Individual local authorities are responsible for and well placed to make funding and commissioning decisions about the SHSs that best meet the needs of their local populations.