I have been involved with Terrence Higgins Trust for a long time, there’s nothing like the progress, whether being a backbencher or out there in civil society just trying to do the best for change, it really matters and it’s incredible what we have done. Sometimes swimming against the tide we delivered change, sometimes we had champions within the conservative government and yes we delivered change as well. All of these things are incredible but being in government, there’s nothing like it at all. We stood on a manifesto where we would end new HIV transmissions by 2030, we stood on a platform, a manifesto that had an HIV action plan at its heart. We are now setting about from a position of government of delivering it.

Now a key thing to say rather than listing all of the interventions that we are already making, the department that I now find myself Secretary of State for is funding directly 93 HIV projects. We are trying to harness the power of science, life science and technology to bring these together to try and turbo charge the progress we need, bearing in mind just how fast and rapidly-evolving and how fast it is speeding up the progress and that many of the things the people living with HIV are benefitting from now were unimaginable 20 years ago and that’s a real credit to our scientific community and all those who’ve campaigned and Terrence Higgins Trust for bringing these people, these organisations and groups together. But what we’re trying to do now is take learning from what has worked in the past and deliver it on steroids and the key thing is that partnership out these between the private sector, between campaigning organisations, researchers in the university sector, we now need to add government as an active partner in partnership because if we do that we can make huge progress.

When you saw the manifesto we put forward, when you saw the programme of government we put forward to the electorate in the last election it was a change manifesto. It was an election where the voters decided it was about change, and this is ones of those areas that need to benefit from it. But the 5 missions is far more radical than many people appreciated at the time when Kier started announcing the missions because every single election that has gone before has been based on departmental silos, so they were always split up… health, education, transport, culture… but the 5 missions are all by definition cross government and no government has ever stood on a manifesto that actually just brought together government and looked at it as a series of missions that our country, our nation has to benefit from is we are to succeed and reach our potential in the future -  far more radical than people realise and far more difficult to deliver than people appreciated.

So for those of us here now, and the Health Secretary Wes, trying to deliver on it we have to act and think differently from any government that has gone before. Because the only way we will deliver, the only way we will get the final pieces of the jigsaw when it comes to HIV is if people like me and Wes work together. I can tell you as he’s standing here, Wes and I are joined on the hip, we are absolutely united in this, on this and several other areas where technology and science, where the power of R&D is going to tackle the challenges the country faces. I can tell you we are working as closely in government as we were in opposition, where we actually shared an office so that’s saying something. So trying to integrate the teams. Our policy teams are already integrated, the office for life sciences Wes and I jointly chair. In the first two weeks of government we brought the teams together and started jointly running through the programme of government together, this is the way we’ll start delivering and it will be a partnership approach in government as we can’t expect you to work in partnership if we can’t put our money where our mouth is inside government and I can tell you now that we absolutely are, so going forward you can expect more of this, you can expect Wes and I to come round the table and do what it takes to deliver on our promises because we are absolutely committed to.

You’ll know from our long experience of Terrence Higgins Trust outside of government that we are bringing that inside government. And I’d like to thank everyone single one of you, whether you’re a campaigner, working for Terrence Higgins Trust, whether you’re working in the life sciences areas of pharmaceuticals who are in the cutting edge of developing some of the solutions that we need, I can tell you that with us you’ll have a partner in government like you’ve never had before. Thank you.