Labour MP Says Poorer Areas Must Be Targeted With Resources As Measles Cases Rise
There have been over 500 cases of measles in England since the beginning of the year. (Alamy)
6 min read
A Labour MP has told PoliticsHome government needs to target resources at "poorer areas" in order to increase vaccine uptake amid a rise in cases of measles in the UK.
Take-up of key vaccines has dropped below recommended levels by the World Health Organisation (WHO), and cases of measles are rising in the UK, with more than 500 cases reported since January 2025 in England.
It has prompted one MP to call for a greater focus on how resources are deployed, while others say that more must be done to tackle the spread of misinformation about vaccines in a post-Covid world.
Measles is a highly infectious disease with symptoms including sore eyes, a fever, and a cough - and can lead to deadly complications like meningitis, pneumonia, and blindness.
Children in the UK are usually vaccinated at a young age with the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Earlier this month, a child died at Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool after contracting measles following a rise in cases in the area.
Labour MP Dr Beccy Cooper, who sits on the health and social care committee and also worked as a public health doctor, told PoliticsHome the rising cases of measles in the UK are "absolutely" a cause for concern, with the summer holidays heightening the risk of the spread.
"Measles is a highly infectious disease, and without [...] those high levels of immunity in the population - 95 per cent recommended by the WHO - we are at risk of seeing increasing numbers of outbreaks," she said.
Cooper told PoliticsHome she did not think it was "controversial" to say the government should be allocating more resources to tackle the issue, as part of the government's push for disease prevention within its 10-year strategy.
Cooper said the resources should be "allocated appropriately" to vaccinate communities it's been "hard to reach" previously.
"We used to call them 'hard to reach' communities, and then we realized [...] they were just not yet reached [...] they tend to be communities that don't access health services very often, and for a variety of reasons," said Cooper.
"But quite often it's people who are very busy working and find [it] hard to make the time to get their kids to GP surgeries, to get vaccinated.
"Quite often we find in poorer areas, sometimes there's not the transport to get to healthcare venues - sometimes, in areas where English isn't a first language, it's harder to reach those communities to get the messages across that vaccination is really important."
Cooper said better resource allocation was needed to make sure that unreached communities were vaccinated and protected from diseases like measles.
"We have to work harder to make sure that the vaccination access is really easy [...] for people who are very busy working, so don't have the time to pop into GP surgeries.
"We have to consider mobile units, we have to consider catch-up clinics, we have to consider putting vaccinators in different settings... going to people, rather than expecting people to come to us."
She also said it was important to cater to communities where English may not be the first language, or cultural differences may make vaccination more challenging.
"[We need to be] making sure that information is available in different languages, having community champions, so people in the community - elders, leaders - who can basically talk to people about any misconceptions they have about vaccination," said Cooper.
"Similarly, if some people are very vaccine adverse, it's listening to their concerns, listening to their queries, and then meeting them where they're at, and talking about the evidence that is there and allowing any concerns."
PoliticsHome understands the UKHSA has conducted risk assessments and is conducting contact tracing for those at risk of exposure to measles, and providing support to educational settings. Summer ‘catch-up’ immunisation clinics are also being set up for children and young people in Liverpool, Knowsley, Sefton and St Helens, areas where uptake of the MMR jab is lower.
Labour MP Josh Fenton-Glynn, also on the health and social committee with experience working in public health, said he and "many others have noticed since Covid, there has been a lot more pushback on medical beliefs", which was also driving the drop in vaccination.
A survey by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) on parental attitudes to childhood vaccines for 2025 found that 87 per cent of parents think vaccines work, down from 89 per cent in 2024.
"I think, essentially, it's because too many of the anti-vax conspiracy theorists and so forth were allowed to operate in the dark without pushback, and they've increasingly grown this kernel of doubt, which is putting people off vaccinating their kids," said Fenton-Glynn.
The MP said education was important to avoid vaccination rates worsening, warning "misinformation lives and festers in doubt and kind of uncertainty".
"The most important consequence if people don't vaccinate is that they put their children at risk of death," said Fenton-Glynn.
"It means that children who can't be vaccinated for various reasons, because they've got over other illnesses, are put at risk by families who choose not to vaccinate, as well as [...] more risks of mutations...
"This is something that we can, and we should be able to prevent and stop. And it's something that is the basis of public health if we're moving from prevention to cure."
Polling by More in Common found 74 per cent of people believed the MMR vaccine did more good than harm, with 11 per cent reporting it did more harm than good, and 15 per cent stating they didn't know.
Sophie Stowers, research manager at the organisation, said "sceptical scrollers" - the most likely to mistrust vaccines - tended to be "much more open to conspiratorial online content", which was driving their decision not to vaccinate their children.
"They tend to be much more open to conspiratorial online content, they're a very hyper online group as it is - and we know that that's where a lot of like misinformation about these like topics has spread," said Stowers.
"So I think that is certainly a big influence amongst that group, and that group does skew young - and we do see that when we break down our data, that actually people who have had children more recently are much less likely to say that they've had their children vaccinated, even though a majority still do, they are still less likely.
"So I think that does suggest that there is maybe, generationally, more of an openness to online misinformation about vaccines."
For people generally concerned about vaccines, Stowers said "the primary concerns remain the same", but with wider fears around vaccines rather than specific concerns driven by misinformation online claiming vaccines cause autism, as well as conditions like measles being relatively uncommon until recently due to higher vaccination rates.
"Quite often we see people saying, you know, they're just concerned about their child being ill as a result of being vaccinated, of having an adverse reaction - something like that... " said Stowers.
"Some of it is driven by the idea that I think for such a long time there's not been that public concern about measles, or any of the health conditions that the MMR protects against - and so it's one of those things where people think: 'Oh, we don't actually have to worry about this anymore'.
"You've got whole generations who've grown up never really hearing about anyone having a case of measles or mumps or whatever it might be."
