Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of including a polio vaccination for children in London aged one to nine as part of the schools vaccination programme.

On 10 August 2022, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advised that an inactivated polio vaccine booster campaign should be implemented for children aged one to nine years old in all London boroughs. To ensure rapid deployment and high uptake, NHS England decided to use general practitioner practices and community vaccine sites as the primary route for the booster programme. Use of school aged providers was not considered optimal since there are currently no primary school-based vaccination programmes in England with the exception of flu, which uses a different delivery model.