Health visitors rework early years checks for London families
Health visitor teams supporting young children in London are reshaping how and where they carry out early years checks, as the latest national data for April 2024 to March 2025 show overall coverage of post-birth reviews has risen above 80% across England while London still records some of the lowest rates for key toddler assessments.
Office for Health Improvement and Disparities figures published on 4 November 2025 confirm that, nationally, 85.2% of babies in 2024 to 2025 received a new birth visit from a health visitor within 14 days and 98.0% were seen within 30 days, up from 83.0% within 14 days in 2023 to 2024, signalling that most families are now being reached soon after discharge even as staffing and caseload pressures persist.
The same statistical release shows that by 2024 to 2025 around 88.4% of children in England had received their 12 month review by 15 months and 80.8% had completed a 2 to 2 and a half year review, but regional breakdowns highlight that London sits at the bottom of the table for both, with 80.0% coverage for 12 month checks and 68.4% for 2 to 2 and a half year reviews compared with 95.7% and 90.5% respectively in the North East, leaving a gap of more than 15 percentage points for some milestones.
Annual commentary for 2023 to 2024 underlines that the direction of travel has generally been upwards since 2022 to 2023, with timely 6 to 8 week reviews rising from 79.6% to 81.8% and the proportion of children receiving a 2 to 2 and a half year review moving from 73.2% to 78.4%, even though both measures still sat just below their pre-pandemic levels and showed marked variation between upper tier local authorities such as Barnet, where early new birth visit coverage was among the lowest reported.
An updated Child and Maternal Health “Fingertips” profile in March 2025 records revised data for boroughs including Tower Hamlets, and confirms that regional figures for London and England have been adjusted to reflect late submissions, while a separate analysis of 57 local authorities in 2024 found that 80% delivered more additional visits than the five mandated contacts, with a median of 1.6 extra reviews per child layered on top of the core schedule.
Written evidence to Parliament from the Institute of Health Visiting highlights that this pattern of extra visits is often concentrated in the most deprived communities, and national statistics for 2023 to 2024 show that coverage of infant and toddler reviews in the two most deprived deciles of local authorities consistently sits above the England average, suggesting that London teams working in high-need neighbourhoods are trying to balance heavy caseloads with targeted support rather than spreading contacts evenly across the city.
For London parents, the practical effect is a mixed picture in which most families now see a health visitor at home or in clinic several times before a child’s third birthday, but timeliness and frequency of those checks can differ sharply between boroughs and estates, with access shaped as much by local staffing, transport links and deprivation patterns as by the national expectation that every child will receive the same five core reviews.
