Infants, Parents and Carers Bill

Amanda Martin Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 4th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Helen Hayes]

I agree with the right hon. Member about the importance of face-to-face services. I mentioned the excellent community midwifery services that I was able to benefit from as a new mother. We have got ourselves into a terrible state with maternity care right across the country, with tragedies and a real challenge in turning those services around. One of the things I found so important and appreciated so much about that community midwifery service was that during the course of my pregnancies, I got to know the team of five midwives who worked in that service. One of those midwives took me through labour and the antenatal period. That was so important for building the trust that, in midwifery and maternity services in particular, has been badly damaged by service failures in lots of areas of the country.

My second daughter has two middle names, one of which is Agnes. Agnes is the midwife who delivered both my babies through that excellent community midwifery service, about which I cannot speak highly enough. Those services have now largely gone; midwifery services are not delivered in that way anymore.

On the delivery of online services, parents and carers—all of us—look for advice online all the time, so it is important that there are accredited, reliable, trustworthy sources of good information online. I do not dismiss the role of online services, but they cannot ever be a substitute for the delivery of in-person services.

As our Labour Government seek to restore some of the provision that was lost as Sure Start was dismantled, and to respond to the challenges that families face by expanding Best Start family hubs, there are some vital considerations. The first, which my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier) alluded to, is the principle of universality. None of us comes to parenthood for the first time knowing everything about what is best for our baby. For many new parents, irrespective of material resources, the experience is overwhelming. It is an incredibly vulnerable time of life: 10% to 15% of new mothers experience post-partum depression. We should therefore ensure that all new parents can access support and advice in the earliest years, and that it is easily accessible for everyone in their local communities. If support was delivered in that way, there would be no stigma associated with accessing it, and there would be the added benefit of helping to build community cohesion by giving parents from different backgrounds living in the same area an opportunity to connect with each other.

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making some valid points about Sure Start, which I was able to use for two of my children; the service had disappeared by the time I had my third child. When we talk about involving all parents, does she agree that we need to make sure that fathers are involved? In the parental leave work that is going on, we have to ensure that self-employed fathers are not left out due to a lack of access to paternity leave. That would make it really difficult for them to attend these places that we are introducing and would cause stigma.

--- Later in debate ---

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

I begin by paying tribute to the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) for breaking with his decades-long tradition of eschewing private Member’s Bills and engaging with this process. I congratulate him on coming top of the ballot and was very amused by his response when he won that lottery—one that many of us in this House would love to win. I congratulate him on his choice of Bill, and the work that he has done with the 1001 Critical Days Foundation—with Andrea Leadsom, Will Quince and others—to enshrine in law the support that babies, parents and carers should receive, as well as ensuring that there is proper accountability in place to make sure that that support is forthcoming.

Many Members have talked about their parenting experiences. I was just thinking how I remember my first being born, and today she has just started year 8 of school aged 12. I cannot even begin to imagine how quickly she has grown up, and I remember those sleepless nights. I think about those tiny babies: vulnerable, defenceless, voiceless—except for when they are screaming for food at 3 am—yet so often overlooked in policymaking and service planning, something that the NSPCC has described in its briefing as the “baby blind spot”. We have so many other services and provision for older children enshrined in law, but not for our youngest and most vulnerable citizens.

As others have already said, we know that a person’s quality of life and outcomes are profoundly shaped by those early months and years. People have talked about the rapid brain development; the first 1,001 days lay the foundations for a child’s development, including attachment, emotional regulation, language and lifelong physical and mental health. As we have heard, babies are entirely reliant on the adults around them to protect and nurture them. Again, that is why I was shocked to read in the NSPCC briefing that 61% of child deaths happen in babies under the age of one. That is profoundly shocking. It underscores the importance of the support that we provide to parents and carers, ensuring that people are going into people’s homes to see what is going on, as the Chair of the Treasury Committee, the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), has said.

We have talked about the first 1,001 days being crucial, but that actually starts at conception, going through pregnancy and birth and into a child’s early years—we have to ensure that support is there before those difficulties become crises. Yet at the moment, help and support for parents and carers remains really quite patchy across the country. The healthy babies programme is extremely welcome, bringing together infant feeding, perinatal mental health and parent-infant relationship support alongside wider health and family services, but at the moment it covers only 75 local authorities in England. It is quite right and sensible that the Government have targeted the areas of greatest disadvantage first with the roll-out of that programme, but we do need that support quickly right across the country.

I represent an affluent constituency, but we do have pockets of real deprivation within the constituency, and pockets of deprivation within a much more affluent area tend to be overlooked even more. Also, let us face it: whatever someone’s sociodemographic situation, new parents need support. Yes, some of that support can be bought, but being signposted to a trusted place in those early days and weeks is absolutely critical.

We have talked about people going into the homes of new parents and babies to provide support. The number of health visitors has fallen by 40% over the past decade, and in some areas practitioners are responsible for more than 1,000 children, far exceeding the recommended caseload of 250 children per practitioner.

Research by the NSPCC has found that more than half of parents of young children do not feel confident about the support that was available to them in their local area. There are issues with both accessibility, which we have talked about, and which is variable across the country, and awareness—although 66% of parents had heard of family hubs, only 16% had actually used one.

I want to pay tribute to the many voluntary sector organisations that often step into the gaps in national and local government service provision and support that are left around the country. I have seen this in my constituency with charities such as Home-Start, which supports new parents and children, and specifically with the charity The Extra Mile, which was set up by the Hampton Methodist church in Hampton. It takes in donations of all sorts of baby equipment and clothes. It gets many referrals from GPs, midwives, health visitors and social services and is constantly giving so much out to families in need, not just in my constituency, but well beyond it.

I also want to give a shout-out to Reach family hub in Feltham, which is not in my constituency but just down the road, in an area of deprivation. Thanks to the inspirational work of a headteacher at Reach academy, Reach has worked with health services and the local authority to provide a family hub with charitable support very close to the school, meaning that the academy is engaging with parents-to-be right from conception through to when their children go to school at Reach, up to 16, and then on to Reach college, up to the age of 18. The academy has identified that that early support is absolutely crucial for the most disadvantaged families.

It goes without saying that babies cannot speak for themselves, advocate for their needs or demand better services. I think that that is one of the reasons they are so overlooked. It should not fall to exhausted parents and carers to have to fight tooth and nail for the essential services they need to protect and nurture their children.

It is our duty as elected representatives and policymakers to ensure that parents and carers have access to the support that they need, when they need it, so that every child has the best start in life. As the hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Amanda Martin) said, however, this needs to be coupled with a serious review, which I know the Government are undertaking, and I hope they will make their proposals soon for better maternity, paternity and shared parental leave arrangements. I include leave for kinship carers in that. Many in this House will know that I and other Members from across the parties have been working on this issue for a long time. We want families to have genuine choice and flexibility in how they look after their children, and all the evidence shows that having a parent, whoever it is—it does not have to be the mother; it often is, but in my children’s case, often my husband was with them, while I was out at work—more present at home helps with attachment and emotional development.

Government policy over the years has been heavily skewed towards trying to get parents back into the workplace as soon as possible. That is excellent for those families who want that, but we need to provide genuine choice, so providing more support for parents who want to spend more time at home should be a Government priority.

[Amanda Martin]

From the work that I have been doing, it is evident that 90% of parental leave is taken by the top 50% of earners in this country. That means that this is part of the class system; we are not allowing those lower-paid workers to take time with their babies. It is not that they do not want to be a good dad; they are literally priced out of being able to be a good dad.

[Munira Wilson]

I could not agree more. Statutory paternity leave, statutory maternity leave and shared parental leave pay is less than half the minimum wage. That is not affordable for parents who want to stay at home, whether they are a mum or a dad, and we as a society really need to look at this seriously. If we believe in investing in our children, we have to start here.

There have been a number of attacks on the coalition today, which I am happy to take on the chin, but in government it was the Liberal Democrats who fought hard to introduce shared parental leave. It still pains me to this day that take-up is so low because it is not affordable. Big employers that want to be competitive in the marketplace are providing really good and enhanced benefits in the form of shared parental leave, which attracts people—particularly dads—who want to spend more time with their family. The businesses realise that it is good for them, because they get more women coming back to the workplace sooner so that dads can then spend more time at home. They also get more engaged and more productive employees. I really hope that the Government’s review of parental leave arrangements will result in a better offer on the table for parents in all sorts of families—not only those with birth children, but kinship carers, too.

This Bill is excellent. It is quite high level, but finally putting a legal duty on the Secretary of State to report annually on the provision of infant support services and their contribution to securing positive outcomes puts the wellbeing of babies and their parents firmly on the agenda. It should also keep them on the agenda and protect babies and parents, whoever is in Government, although I note that some Members who think they ought to be in Government are off at their conference.

The measure of a nation is how it treats its weakest citizens. If we truly care about the future of our country, we must start by caring and investing in babies and children. I am delighted to support this Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Amanda Martin]

I thank my hon. Friend for referring to the Labour Government’s initiation of Sure Start. Our Prime Minister, who was shadow Education Secretary, actually kept Sure Start going in Manchester while he was mayor. Even before coming to this place as Prime Minister, he continued to see the value of Sure Start in our early years education.

[Mrs Hodgson]

That is a really good point, which gives us great hope that the Prime Minister will help to rebuild that, and protect what we are discussing, going forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michelle Welsh (Sherwood Forest) (Lab)]

For complete transparency, let me say that I am the national maternity adviser to the Government; I wanted to make that clear before I begin my remarks. I wish to place on the record my sincere gratitude and thanks to the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) for bringing this Bill to the House. I am genuinely delighted to speak in support of it, because its subject matter goes right to the heart of why I entered public service in the first place.

There is one principle that has guided me throughout my working life: where someone is born should not determine their future. The postcode where someone is born, their parents’ income, and whether they are born in an affluent community or a former mining community, should never determine how healthy they are, how well they do at school or the opportunities they will have throughout their life. If we genuinely believe that, then we have to begin at the beginning—not at secondary school or primary school, but during pregnancy, at birth and in those first precious moments and years when so much of a child’s future is being shaped. That is why the Bill matters so much. It asks us to look seriously at the support available to babies and families, and at whether the provision we have actually meets their needs.

This debate takes me back to the beginning of my career, in the heyday. Before coming to the House, I spent years working with children, young people and families, first for the YMCA in America, then back in Nottinghamshire, and then developing Sure Start services across Nottinghamshire and Derby. I worked on the frontline, directly with parents and children, and then I moved into management, helping to develop, plan and co-ordinate services for families—all based on the principles of early intervention, support and prevention.

I was fortunate to work at a time when there was a real belief that children and families should sit at the centre of public policy. We not only talked about early intervention and prevention; we developed services to deliver it, bringing services together, including things like the common assessment framework. Crucially, we talked to parents, families and communities. I believed in Sure Start then and I believe in the principles behind it every bit as strongly today.

Sure Start was never simply a building with a sign on it; it was an idea—a philosophy—not only about how we should treat families, but about how we give every child, no matter their background, the best possible start in life. It said that families should not have to be in crisis before somebody helps them, and that becoming a parent should not mean being handed a list of telephone numbers and then being expected to navigate half a dozen public services on your own. It recognised that a child’s life does not fit neatly into departmental boxes. There was early education and childcare, health visitors, breastfeeding support, parenting programmes, speech and language support, stay and play sessions, and family support and outreach. There was advice about benefits, employment and training. There was support for parents as well as for their children.

And sometimes the most important intervention was not a formal programme at all—sometimes it was a cup of tea. In Nottinghamshire, we understand the power of a brew, because what it really means is to stop: for someone to listen, for someone to care and for someone to help. While I am not advocating for tea to necessarily be a national policy or an amendment to the Bill—nor will I ever advocate for how the Prime Minister makes a cuppa—I will always advocate for those working on the frontline having time to care, time to stop and time to listen, whether they are a support worker in a family hub, a health visitor or a midwife.

Sometimes Sure Start was about a mum walking into a children’s centre, sitting down beside someone she had begun to trust and quietly saying, “Can I talk to you?” That conversation could be the beginning of getting help—that mattered. Relationships mattered and we worked with parents; I feel incredibly strongly about that. Good family policy cannot simply be designed in Whitehall and done to people. Parents know their children and their communities. They know what works and what is missing. When I worked with parents, we listened to them, we involved them, we asked them what they needed and we learned from them. We understood that the mother who did not attend a group was not necessarily hard to reach—perhaps we were hard to reach. Perhaps there was no bus, or the sessions were at the wrong time. Perhaps she was frightened of being judged. Perhaps she was exhausted.

[Amanda Martin]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. Those places were a place for a cuppa, as we would say—somewhere to go along to without judgment. As someone who had been a teacher but had not had my own children, when I had my second child and did not know that I had post-natal depression, it was in the Sure Start centre that it was picked up, because somebody knew I was not being me; they were able to pick up on that. It was a really good working relationship with our midwives and local GPs, but also with the network of friends that you came to trust, whether you were talking about baby’s poo or about the fact that you did not feel yourself.

[Michelle Welsh]

That is exactly what it was all about. When that approach began to change—and it did change—I did not want to sit on the sidelines and complain about it; I wanted to do something. That journey eventually brought me to this place.

I believe the principles behind Sure Start should never be consigned to history. We should learn from them and build on them, and whatever name we put above the door today, the fundamental principle must remain services built around the child and the family. That begins before a baby is born; it begins with maternity, and through my campaign on maternity safety, and—most importantly—through listening to families, those on the frontline, charities and organisations, I have become absolutely convinced that maternity policy cannot sit in a silo, separate from children’s policy. Safe maternity care, maternal physical health and mental health, supporting fathers and parents, and making sure that women are listened to are all early years policy. We cannot talk seriously about giving every baby the best start in life without talking about the care their mothers receive.

I believe we need fundamental reform. That is why one of the most central proposals I have argued for is an independent maternity commissioner—someone whose sole focus is women, babies and families, with the independence and authority to change and challenge the system. When something goes catastrophically wrong, families should not have to become investigators, they should not have to understand every layer of the NHS, and they should not have to fight organisation after organisation simply to get the truth about what happened to the woman or the baby they love. We also need better national data, proper national standards and a culture where staff can speak up. Good midwives, obstetricians, maternity support workers and other staff who raise concerns should be listened to and protected, because a safe culture is one where people can say something is wrong before another family is harmed.

There is another part of maternity reform that I believe is fundamental, which is continuity of care. I want us to be much more ambitious about what we mean by continuity. I do not believe that continuity should mean a good handover from one professional to another—I believe the same person should stay. A woman should be able to build a relationship with someone throughout their maternity journey. That relationship should not simply end because her baby has been born; every woman should leave hospital following birth with a full debrief, not simple discharge paperwork. That is part of prevention.

Continuity also gives us an opportunity to address the appalling inequalities we see in maternity care. The latest MBRRACE-UK data shows that black women still face nearly three times the maternal mortality risk of white women, and women living in the most deprived areas have around twice the maternal mortality rate of women in the least deprived communities. These inequalities are unacceptable, and we cannot simply publish those statistics year after year and call it action; we have to design services that actively confront inequality and discrimination. Continuity can be part of that. If somebody actually knows the woman—knows her history and her circumstances—and is responsible for staying with her, it becomes much harder for her concerns to disappear between appointments, or for her to be forced to tell her story over and over again.

All of this connects directly to the wider health and development of the baby. After maternity comes health visiting, then perhaps a family hub, early years provision, nursery and eventually school. Governments see these as separate services, separate budgets, and sometimes separate Departments; a parent sees none of that. They see their child—one child, one family, one continuous journey. That is how Governments should see them, too. A health visitor may identify a developmental concern, a mother may need breastfeeding or feeding support, or parents may notice speech and language difficulties. There may be early indications of SEND, housing conditions affecting a child’s health, financial pressure or difficulty in the parents’ relationship. A mother may be experiencing depression. None of those things exists neatly on its own.

The worst possible system is one that waits until a family has deteriorated sufficiently to meet a threshold for help. We should not wait for a crisis; early intervention works. If we can support the mother earlier, we should. If we can help a family earlier, we should. If we can identify a child’s need earlier, we should. If we can prevent someone from reaching crisis, we should. That is not wasteful public spending; it is intelligent public spending, and it brings us directly to education.

Education can transform a person’s life. I know that personally, as I was the first person in my family to go to university. I defeated the odds, but it does not and should not have to be that way. If we are serious about closing the achievement gap, we have to be honest about when it begins. It does not suddenly appear when a child starts secondary school. For some children, inequality begins to take hold before they ever walk through the school gates. Children arrive in reception having had very different starts in life.

Every child deserves the opportunity to fulfil their potential. That should be not an aspiration reserved for the lucky few; it should be a promise that we make to every child born in this country. I know the Opposition do not think that we should talk about the 1980s, but I do, because I know what happens when hope is taken away. Growing up on a council estate in Notts in the 1980s, I lived and breathed it, and now I serve those very communities, which are still up against it.

I came into public service and eventually into politics because I believe that government can put hope back. That is what Sure Start represented to me. That is what safe maternity care should represent. That is what good health services, early years support and education should represent—not charity or a favour, but opportunity: the opportunity for a mother to be safe and heard, the opportunity for a family to be supported before they reach crisis, the opportunity for a baby to be given the very best start in life, and the opportunity for every child, whatever street they are born in and whatever their parents earn, to look at their future and believe it belongs to them. Ultimately, that is the test of everything we do here—not whether we can write another strategy or create another pathway, but whether the child born tonight in the poorest household in the country has the same right to dream, to thrive and to succeed as the child born into the richest. Where someone is born should never determine their future, but what we choose to do in this House can.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Mullan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention because it brings me nicely to my next point. In these scenarios we have to avoid any judgment or lecturing parents who are unable to do that, because there are many reasons why parents differ. It is not just about time or money; there is good research about the links between life outcomes and values and ideas in someone’s upbringing.

There are all sorts of factors. It is difficult and things have changed so much. Several decades ago, most people were raising their children within walking distance of their wider kinship network. Most people saw their own parents at least every other day, and a wider network of people were involved in raising a child. That is much more physically difficult to achieve these days. We have had all the focus on social media and the challenges it presents. I will go on to thank the 1001 Critical Days Foundation later, but it has commissioned research into screen time for babies, showing the impact of excessive screen time even on babies, while our focus has been on older children.

If we get this wrong, the consequences are for everyone to see. I am a shadow Justice Minister. Crime costs us between £170 billion and £250 billion a year. We know that if a child experiences four or more adverse childhood events, they are more than 20 times more likely to end up in custody at some point as an adult. All these things are interconnected.

The question is: how do we help? I had the privilege of visiting Sidley family hub in my constituency relatively recently, and I spoke to the professionals there who meet and work with parents every day. I asked them, “What is the most important thing that you do?” The most important thing they say, consistently, to people from all backgrounds, was that it was okay to ask for help and to say, “I need help.” The most important thing they say, consistently, to people from all backgrounds, was that it was okay to ask for help and to say, “I need help.” It is about challenging the stigma, so that everyone feels it is all right to ask for help. We do not think we can necessarily do the plumbing, the gas or the electrics in our houses without help, and parenting is 10 times more complicated and difficult than any of those jobs. It is normal for people to think they might need some help at various points along the way.

Returning to the Bill, there are a few reasons why I support it. The first is its focus on babies, because anything else we do further down the chain will not be as good as anything we do at the start. The sooner we do anything we can to help a parent be more effective, to help them understand the role and to support them, the more we get back from that investment. Our funding pyramid in this area is completely the wrong way round. Money builds up as we go further along the journey, but if that money was spent on day one and from conception onwards, we would get much more from it.

The second reason I support the Bill is clause 1(2)(b), which talks specifically about supporting the relationship between a parent or carer and an infant. This is about relationships as much as it is about anything else, and it is great that the Bill states that so clearly.

The third reason I support the Bill is the provision to report regularly. We all know that reporting does not necessarily create the impacts and change that we want, but it is a powerful tool for parliamentarians across parties to make it difficult for Governments to move an issue out of the spotlight, so I welcome that provision.

I will also touch on the Bill’s terminology, and the fact that it talks about carers. I recently met a kinship carer in my constituency who was looking after her own grandchildren. Such people provide an enormous service to our society in so many different ways. I am talking not just about kinship carers, but adoptive parents and others. From a purely financial perspective, the money that would be spent on those children if they were in care of one form or another is astronomical. These people take that burden on, and it is natural and human to want to do that. I do not think we should be thinking about them doing it for money or paying them—people should want to look after their wider family network—but at the very least we should be spending money on making sure that it is as easy as possible for them to do that, so that if anybody ever said to them, “How was it being a kinship carer?” we would know that every single kinship carer would be a cheerleader and a champion for it. We want them to be able to say, “It was difficult, but I felt fantastically supported.” I do not think I have ever met anyone who says that about their experience of being a kinship carer.

[Amanda Martin]

The hon. Member rightly highlights the fantastic work of kinship carers. One area that often goes unrecognised is siblings who take on their younger brothers and sisters. They may have experienced care themselves, and we have to make sure, when they hit adulthood, that the service wraps around them and provides them the opportunity to be successful in their life while caring for their brothers and sisters.

[Dr Mullan]

I thank the hon. Member for raising that point, because people stepping up in those circumstances is incredibly important. Those who have siblings will know the importance of siblings in helping each other out and supporting each other through life—I have experienced that. All these wider family networks do so much. If they were not doing it, the state would end up picking up the bill, and that would not be good for anybody, so I pay tribute to how this Bill recognises the wider set of people who are involved in raising children.

I conclude by again thanking my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West and the 1001 Critical Days Foundation. I also pay tribute, as many others have done, to the right hon. Dame Andrea Leadsom for her work over many years. Like the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Maya Ellis), I am an officer of the all-party parliamentary group on babies (pregnancy to age two), and I thank the Parent-Infant Foundation for the work it does as the APPG’s secretariat. This Bill is a great opportunity to channel so much of the work that we want to do as part of that APPG. I welcome this debate and the attention it has given to the most important task ahead of any society, which is to raise the next generation successfully.