Huddersfield couple say NHS fertility treatment for gay people is a postcode lottery

A couple from Huddersfield are backing a legal challenge which claims that NHS fertility treatment for gay people is a postcode lottery.

Beth Harris-Croft and her wife have two children - the youngest conceived through IVF.

Same sex couples in Calderdale and Huddersfield now have the same rights as anyone else. But in some areas couples have to pay tens of thousands of pounds more for treatment.

This comes after a married lesbian couple launched a landmark legal test case against Britain's NHS to ensure that all queer people can start a family.

Social media influencers Megan Bacon-Evans, 34, and her wife Whitney, 33, have accused the NHS fertility sector in England of barring same-sex couples from starting a family based on wealth.

They say they have to pay tens of thousands of pounds to become eligible for NHS-funded in vitro fertilization (IVF), unlike mixed-sex couples.

The couple, known widely to their 210,000 YouTube, TikTok and Twitter followers as Wegan, rocketed to fame as bloggers in 2009. Even featuring on the BBC's Britain's Relationship Secrets documentary and the reality bridal show Say Yes to the Dress.

Bacon-Evans and Whitney, both from Windsor, accused on Sunday (7 November) their clinical commissioning group in Frimley, a town in Surrey, of slapping them with a "gay tax".

NHS Frimley CCG, according to The Guardian, asks female same-sex couples and single people with wombs to pay 12 intrauterine insemination (IUI) or rounds of IVF treatments to "prove" their medical fertility before becoming eligible to receive subsisted help on the NHS.

Cisgendered mixed-gender couples, meanwhile, must only have tried to conceive for two years before receiving NHS funding.

The CCG, which covers some 800,000 patients across Windsor and Maidenhead, Bracknell Forest, Slough, Surrey Heath, north-east Hampshire and Farnham, denied discrimination.

Campaigning legal firm Leigh Day, backed by Stonewall and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, filed a judicial review on Monday (8 November) on behalf of the couple claiming prejudice under the 2010 Equality Act, the benchmark of anti-discrimination law in Britain.

If the courts grant them permission, the case could be heard as early as January next year in the high court's administrative division.