Sexual health services are not meeting the needs of young people despite the government’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, the Commons Health Select Committee has warned.

The cross-party committee of MPs in a report on sexual health warns that young people are "being failed by an education which persistently delivers too little, too late," and places a mistaken emphasis on sex at the expense of young people’s wider concerns about relationships. The committee recommends that sex and relationship education is made a statutory part of the national curriculum.

Although it recommends against promoting sexual abstinence to young people, the committee found that many young people who have not had sex believed they were in the minority and a significant proportion regretted their first sexual experience.

Young people would benefit from more support in resisting external pressures to have sex which is why sex education should take place in a framework of relationship education, says the committee.

It also recommends that school students should be able to access through the internet high quality information on sexual health.