Teenagers would be targeted by a major expansion of sex education enabling them to 'take control' of their intimate lives under startling new Tory plans to combat the increase in sexual diseases. The move marks a departure from years of right-wingers demanding that children be taught to abstain.
Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary and a Tory moderniser, will underline the change of tack by visiting a clinic run by a charity for lesbians and gay people in Manchester this week.
Dismissing calls for US-style abstinence education which encourages teenagers to pledge to remain virgins, Lansley said yesterday that a national network of school nurses - giving unbiased advice about sex - would be introduced if the Tories won power. He also backs moves to issue over-the-counter tests for chlamydia, one of the most common infections which can cause infertility.
'I'm not talking about abstinence, I'm talking about something designed to empower young people to choose,' he told The Observer. 'It's feeling one has a greater sense of control over what one does with one's body, and being able to resist peer pressure or pressure from boyfriends.'
Waiting times for appointments at sexual health clinics would be cut to 48 hours, after the Chief Medical Officer recently condemned 'unacceptably long' waiting times of up to two months in some areas for treatment.
The plans may upset family values campaigners and more traditional Tories, who argue that both sex education and more readily available sexual health services only encourages teenagers.
They will also irritate health ministers, planning to unveil their own crackdown on sexually transmitted infections in a White Paper on public health in the autumn. This too will include cutting waiting times for treatment, making tests more easily available, and refocusing sex education.
However Lansley said the rise in infections demanded urgent action. Figures released last month showed chlamydia up by 9 per cent and syphilis up by 26 per cent between 2002 and 2003.
Diagnoses of HIV have risen 150 per cent since 1996, and it is now the fastest growing serious condition in the UK. Lansley said the most successful modern safe sex campaign was the Tory anti-Aids drive in the late Eighties and early Nineties, considered shocking at the time, with images of tombstones and icebergs. Since then complacency had set in.
'Safer sex messages have been inadequately targeted and the sexually active young population, who can't recall the Eighties campaigns, is tragically unaware of the risks of sexually transmitted infections.
'Services have been lacking in priority and access to services has been poor. A former Conservative government faced up to this issue and succeeded. The next Conservative government will face up to this issue again.'
Research has consistently shown that teenagers delay starting to have sex for longer and are less likely to get pregnant when they are taught not just the mechanics of contraception, but about self esteem and how relationships work.
The Tories would also stage a review of the sexual health services to end the 'postcode lottery' of access to clinics if they won the next general election, and allow charities and voluntary organisations to run clinics and other services, with patients choosing where to go, Lansley said.
