London vaccine gap widens across capital boroughs and schools1

London now sits at the bottom of England’s table for both childhood vaccinations and several cancer screening programmes, with official statistics showing coverage slipping further below the World Health Organization’s 95% target for herd immunity and remaining lower than in any other English region in 2023–24.

For routine childhood jabs, the national picture is already fragile: England’s coverage for the second dose of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine by age five has fallen to around the mid-80 per cent range in the year to March 2025, several percentage points below its mid-2010s peak and well under the WHO benchmark. Within that average, London is an outlier, with UK Health Security Agency data indicating MMR coverage among children by their second birthday hovering just above 80 per cent, and some boroughs such as Hackney reported in the mid-60s, making sustained transmission of measles more likely if exposure occurs.

Local analyses underline how these regional gaps translate into borough-level contrasts. A joint strategic needs assessment in Lewisham reported that by 2022–23 the third dose of the primary DTaP/IPV/Hib course at age one had only partially recovered from pandemic-era falls, reaching just under 90 per cent in Lewisham against slightly lower coverage for London as a whole and just over 90 per cent for England, all short of the 95 per cent national target despite a decade of concerted effort. Similar patterns appear for boosters against meningococcal and pneumococcal disease, where London’s averages in the early 2020s remained in the low-80 per cent range and trailed national coverage in every year.

The equity gap widens further in adolescent immunisation. UKHSA figures for the 2023–24 school year show HPV vaccination in London’s Year 10 pupils below 70 per cent for girls and nearer 60 per cent for boys, compared with uptake above 80 per cent in some other English regions, while local authority data range from coverage under 40 per cent in Lambeth to well over 90 per cent in areas such as Northumberland. Because HPV is implicated in the overwhelming majority of cervical cancers, these patterns feed directly into future screening workload and risk profiles, embedding borough-level inequalities across the life course.

Adult screening services display the same mix of recovery and persistent variation. National breast screening statistics for 2023–24 record close to two million women aged 45 and over being screened and cancer detection at around eight to nine cases per 1,000 women screened, while uptake among those invited has climbed back to about 70 per cent after dropping to the mid-60s the previous year. Yet London remains the lowest-performing region, with NHS data showing just over 560,000 eligible women aged 53–71 screened in the capital in 2024, equating to roughly 62 per cent coverage, up from the mid-50s a year earlier but still well below both the national average and pre-pandemic levels.

Within London, cancer alliances and local screening services report even sharper contrasts, with updates from the West of London breast screening centre citing uptake around the mid-50 per cent range in Ealing and North East London data showing bowel screening improving from the high-50s to the low-60s between 2022 and 2023 while breast screening there remains markedly lower than national benchmarks, particularly in more deprived primary care networks. Taken together with borough-level immunisation audits, these figures suggest that the capital’s headline underperformance is driven less by a single weak programme than by a patchwork of constrained access, staffing and engagement models that leaves preventive coverage consistently lowest where underlying health risks are highest.1

4 August 2025 11:28 By London Health News Desk