Baby Loss Awareness Week

Alison Bennett Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Members for Rossendale and Darwen (Andy MacNae) and for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), and the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt), for their advocacy for better maternity care and for their opening speeches.

I want to begin by talking about an extraordinary woman, my constituent Jane Plumb, from Haywards Heath, and her son Oliver, and the work that they have done with their colleagues in running a charity called Group B Strep Support. They visited Parliament in the summer, and some hon. Members came along to learn more about their campaign, which calls for all expectant mothers to be offered GBS-specific tests late in pregnancy as part of their antenatal care. If that test were offered, more babies could be protected from a life-threatening infection.

I spent some time this afternoon looking at the Group B Strep Support website, and found the history of the charity. I knew that Jane set up the charity after her baby, Theo, died from the infection, and that she had been working on it for decades since then. The first time I saw a photograph of her at Parliament was outside this building with David Cameron; then, a few years later, she met my predecessor, Sir Nicholas Soames, and Theresa May, again while campaigning. That gives hon. Members a sense of the decades that she has put into fighting for babies not to have the same outcome as baby Theo.

The second set of constituents I want to reflect on are the families in Mid Sussex who are part of the Truth for Our Babies campaign. Since last year’s debate to mark Baby Loss Awareness Week, progress has been made for the families in Sussex who lost their babies, the families whose babies were harmed and the mums who were harmed themselves. In last October’s debate, I called for the then Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the right hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), to listen to the calls from those families and the Truth for Our Babies campaign. Their ask was quite clear: an independent review into maternity services at the University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust led, critically, by Donna Ockenden. It was not until April, six months later, that their requests were met.

In the intervening months, the meetings that those families convened with the right hon. Member for Ilford North were raw, emotional and stark. They are meetings I will not forget. I wish the bereaved parents from Truth for Our Babies had not been put in the position where they felt they had no choice but to lay out their babies’ stories again and again in order to be heard.

As so many hon. Members can attest, the distress, pain and exhaustion felt by parents and families tragically stretches on beyond the loss of the baby. It is right and proper that these families receive reviews to better understand what went wrong and to stop things going wrong in the future. I am of course glad that the Sussex maternity review is now under way, but when I receive extremely concerning correspondence from my constituents, such as that which I will briefly go on to quote, I have serious doubts about the way in which reviews are being conducted.

My constituent tells me that

“there is currently no funding available to cover families’ travel expenses to review meetings and that no remuneration arrangements are in place for our time, expertise and emotional labour.”

My constituent rightly notes that this is

“particularly concerning given the review’s commitment to being inclusive and non-discriminatory.”

That is despite the fact that National Institute for Health and Care Research guidance is clear about the importance of properly resourcing public involvement. It recommends payment for public contributors’ time, skills and expertise, alongside reimbursement of reasonable expenses such as for travel. The guidance recognises that financial barriers can prevent people from participating and that appropriate payment and expenses are important to ensuring that involvement is accessible and inclusive.

If families cannot afford the cost of travel or to take time away from work or caring responsibilities, and if they repeatedly revisit traumatic experiences without appropriate recognition and support, the evidence gathered will inevitably be incomplete and potentially fuel the inequalities already in place. I hope that Department of Health and Social Care officials and the Secretary of State will reflect on that. I would be happy to engage with them further as a matter of urgency. I also ask the Secretary of State whether she will heed Group B Strep Support’s calls for screening to be put in place for all expectant women.