Contribution
I will carry on because I have very limited time, but I am happy to write to the hon. Gentleman or talk to him afterwards. I know there are concerns about the cuts that have been made to ICB running costs. These are planned reductions that relate just to administration, not the funding that will be used to provide frontline vaccination services.
Turning to pre-school access, flexible services are critical. Vaccination rates are lowest in the most deprived communities, so improving uptake means making services easier to use. Pre-school children will continue to receive their vaccinations through their GPs. We have increased the payment to GPs for each routine childhood vaccination from £10.06 to £12.06 and changed the GP incentives to reward improvements where uptake is lowest.
However, we recognise that GP services will not reach every family and are therefore testing vaccinations through health visiting teams, including through 12 pilots across England, four of which are in London. Health visitors have brought vaccines to family homes to ensure that the most vulnerable families are offered these lifesaving interventions. We have also been expanding the use of community pharmacies and are evaluating that. We are looking at supporting targeted local outreach as well. The aim is simple: to reach those who might otherwise miss out.
School-age vaccinations are also a priority. The joint school-aged vaccination programme of work with my Department and the Department for Education is now overseeing actions to improve coverage in schools by resolving local delivery problems. The NHS is also rolling-out new digital technology to make it easier for busy parents to provide consent. It has published revised guidance for schools and the NHS and there are regional support forums to tackle any problems that are present.
We also have the Mavis—manage vaccinations in schools—scheme. That is a new digital system that allows parents to give consent online and helps NHS teams to keep records up to date. By September 2026, it will be used by 72% of school vaccination teams, covering more than 13,800 schools, with further expansion planned for April ’27.
Turning next to awareness, most parents want to do the right thing for their children. Our job is to ensure that they can easily find the clear and trustworthy information that they need. That means stronger public campaigns and confident healthcare professionals giving that advice. We think that it could also be provided by schools and better start hubs, as well as trusted local organisations.
We all agree that false claims online can cause huge concern and worry. As a number of hon. Members have said, the actions of politicians have consequences. We all share the responsibility to base our comments on science and evidence. We have seen the damage that misinformation can cause. The entirely discredited and morally repugnant claims linking MMR and autism in the 1990s led to a substantial fall in coverage, so experts now monitor emerging misinformation and respond with accurate information. I hear the calls today for stronger action against social media companies, but we do not want to mistake misinformation for the whole problem. To improve coverage, many families simply need vaccinations to be easier to understand and to access.
I will conclude with the issue of digital and data. We are improving vaccination records. At the moment, information is held in different NHS systems and does not always follow a patient between services. Through new digital systems, we are joining those records together. That will help healthcare professionals to see which vaccinations someone has had, allow the NHS to identify communities where uptake is low and give families clearer records, reminders and information about where to get vaccinated. Over time, families will also be able to access more of this through the NHS app.
Vaccinations have protected generations from serious disease, and all of us have a vested interest in ensuring that they continue to do so. That means clear accountability, easier access, trusted information and better record keeping. As I have set out, we are acting on each of those fronts. Rebuilding coverage will take sustained effort, but we will monitor progress closely and take further action wherever it is needed.
I note that the House of Lords Childhood Vaccinations Committee is due to report shortly. As the new Minister in this post, I will be looking very closely at the recommendations that come out of that report. I have had the chance to look at the letters that the Health and Social Care Committee wrote to one of my predecessors, and I can assure all hon. Members in the room today that I will go back to the Department and redouble my efforts to ensure that we see the increase that we all want in the number of vaccinations, particularly for children. I thank all hon. Members for their contributions this afternoon.