Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many and what proportion of people over the age of 18 have taken up covid-19 vaccination by (a) ethnicity and (b) age; and what assessment he has made of the (i) barriers to vaccination and (ii) effectiveness of Government measures to increase uptake in groups where take up is low.

NHS England and NHS Improvement publish vaccine uptake by both age and ethnicity. This is published daily and ranges from ‘Under 18’ to ‘80+’. There are also weekly and monthly publications of these statistics, which provides a more detailed breakdown of vaccine uptake by age and a detailed breakdown of vaccine uptake by ethnicity. The data can we found at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-vaccinations/

The Department reviews research into COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. This includes information gathered by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), health studies, and insights generated by the vaccine programme itself.

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is monitored by ONS. Data is published to record the reasons people give for vaccine refusal. A breakdown of this data can be found at the following link:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandwellbeing/datasets/coronavirusandvaccinehesitancygreatbritain

This is supported by Healthwatch, who undertook research in Spring 2021 and looked at uptake in ethnic minority groups who are known to be vaccine hesitant. They found that people commonly cited issues such as practical barriers, misinformation, and deeper cultural mistrust.

There have been a range of national and hyper-local initiatives in place to drive uptake, including national communications, provision of mobile/pop-up delivery models and work with faith/community leaders. These efforts have been hugely successful in communicating benefits of vaccination. Vaccine hesitancy has decreased from 9% in February to 3% in August for all adults per ONS data. The statistics also showed hesitancy has decreased for those aged 16 and 17 from 14% to 11%. Furthermore, YouGov polling indicates that hesitancy amongst ethnic minority groups has reduced from 63% to 14% from October to August. This success has been facilitated by the wide range of interventions and strategies employed to ensure strong vaccine uptake.