Immunisation: Children

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Wednesday 8th May 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to address the decline in uptake of childhood immunisations.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Markham) (Con)]

NHS England’s 2023 vaccination strategy set a range of ambitions, including to improve uptake of children’s vaccines across the board. On mumps, measles and rubella in particular, between January and March the NHS and partners administered around four times as many MMR vaccinations to those aged five to 25 as last year and focused on engaging groups with historically lower vaccination rates. We intend to build on these experiences to further improve uptake.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

I thank the Minister for his reply and pay tribute to the NHS for its sterling work in this area. I have a couple of points. First, I wonder what consideration His Majesty’s Government have given to working with leaders of harder-to-reach groups, some of the smaller groups and some of the faith groups, where messaging can be more powerful when it is done by a local leader. Secondly, there is a worrying increase in the level of whooping cough. Indeed, I believe there has been a childhood death recently. Can the Minister update us on what is being done about this worrying development?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I thank the right reverend Prelate. First, I completely agree that using faith leaders is often a very good way to reach hard-to-reach communities, particularly as it is often ethnic-minority communities that have lower rates of vaccine uptake. Whooping cough has been a concern; we had about 850 cases in January 2024 compared with about 550 for the whole of 2023. We are deploying a number of strategies that have been proven to work in areas such as MMR: using outreach groups, having leaflets in 15 languages and having recall programmes. In the case of whooping cough, if we can get pregnant mothers vaccinated, that is 97% effective.