Maternity Commissioner

Andy MacNae Excerpts

Monday 20th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Andy MacNae (Rossendale and Darwen) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Alec. I will make some comments as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on baby loss, but also as a bereaved parent: we lost our daughter Mallorie at the age of five days.

First, I want to thank everyone who responded to the petition. It shows the massive extent of concern about this issue. So many of us share that concern as something that is personal and requires immediate and comprehensive action. For the past two years, my all-party group has been listening to families, parents and professionals. We have heard about a litany of failures across the whole sector. I am sure that colleagues will refer to many of the issues and incidents, so I will not repeat them, but we have to recognise that these systemic failures often go very deep within the culture of the health service. We need to recognise that that results in fundamental inequalities in terms of ethnicity and deprivation, with families not being listened to and suffering outcomes that are truly unacceptable.

We also have to recognise that there are islands of very good practice. There are trusts and professionals who continue to do an amazing job. I can cite the birth centre at Burnley that my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Maya Ellis) and I visited recently, where we saw how things can be done and what “good” actually looks like.

There is an undeniable case for urgent and immediate action, as I think we all agree. I think we also agree that we cannot repeat the cycle of reports, reviews and recommendations. As the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) said, there have been 700 recommendations, and in many cases they were exactly the same, time after time. We cannot repeat that cycle, which is why it is so important that Baroness Amos’s maternity services investigation is different. I believe that she is entirely committed to addressing the underlying systemic issues across the sector and to bringing forward a report that focuses on the underlying systems and cultures that need to change, rather than just repeating the litany of what has gone before.

Crucially, we also have the Secretary of State’s commitment to establishing a taskforce following the work of that review, to deliver on its recommendations, with an immediate overlap and focus on action. That is why I believe we have a fundamentally different opportunity, right now, to get this right.

The focus on systemic changes must be accompanied by a real commitment to fixed and firm targets to reduce the harm and inequalities that we see today. Oversight and accountability will be a fundamental part of that. We recognise that we currently have an alphabet soup of organisations, with the CQC, NMC and GMC: the Care Quality Commission, the Nursing and Midwifery Council and the General Medical Council. The trusts themselves are essentially autonomous in choosing whether they follow guidelines, so introducing accountability and oversight must be a fundamental outcome of the review. I am absolutely sure that we will see clear recommendations on that point.

Having a maternity commissioner is not a magic sticking-plaster that can address this fundamental, systemic problem. Let us not fool ourselves that any single measure or recommendation will solve this problem. We need to see maternity safety rebuilt from the ground up, with a culture that listens to every single family and every single mother. We need to treat them all as individuals who have their own risk factors, concerns and challenges. We need to learn from the best practice that we see across the country. When bereavements occur, we need parents to be treated with the empathy and individualisation that they require, recognising that trauma does not just affect someone in the days or weeks after birth; it can have lifelong effects. We need to rebuild the regulators, as well as all the mechanisms that hold individual trusts to account, so that they are fit for purpose.

It is only when we get the foundations right—rebuilt from the ground up, with best practices embedded across the board—that a maternity commissioner might possibly be able to deliver the outcomes we want. Let us focus on listening to what Baroness Amos comes forward with, so we can deliver her recommendations and rebuild the culture from its base. Let us concentrate on listening to individual parents and families, so that we can respond to their personal risk factors. Let us make sure that we have a maternity safety system that we can all be proud of in the years to come.