Maternity Commissioner

Beccy Cooper Excerpts

Monday 20th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Dr Beccy Cooper (Worthing West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Ms Jardine—it is not Sir Alec any more—to serve under your chairship. I want to speak in the debate as a member of the Health and Social Care Committee and as the Member of Parliament for Worthing West.

At a local level, University Hospitals Sussex NHS foundation trust has implemented huge improvements, following the raising of the alarm about the safety of our maternity services after a number of heartbreaking, avoidable baby deaths came to light. For the families affected, life will never be the same again. There will now be a review, led by Donna Ockenden, to make sure that the truth of those times is fully heard and understood, that the indescribable experience of those families is documented to best effect and that the lessons are embedded in future practice.

The review will also contribute to improvements that are already making a difference in maternity services at University Hospitals Sussex, including at my own hospital in Worthing. In a recent CQC inspection, maternity services were rated as good. That reflects the maternity survey, in which 98% of women said they felt they had been treated with dignity and respect during labour and birth, and 95% felt involved enough in decisions about their care. We have heard from many colleagues this afternoon about the many times when that has not happened, so I take great hope from the fact that the survey is so positive.

Improvements in those maternity services have included 24/7 birth supporters working with experts by experience to create a restorative culture, bespoke antenatal pathways for asylum seekers and refugees, and specialist midwifery support for Traveller communities. There is strengthened staffing capacity, with 40 additional qualified midwives recruited across the trust’s maternity units, which are now fully staffed, compared with a 15% vacancy rate at the time of the previous inspection. What a difference that has made.

That level of service improvement and delivery needs to be a requisite for all maternity services in this country. The soon to be published Amos review recommendations, which we have heard about this afternoon, will undoubtedly provide a clear blueprint for the national maternity and neonatal taskforce to move things forward. But let us be in no doubt: as has been said, we have had 700 recommendations to date, and we probably know what will be in the Amos review, so let it be the last one.

The tragic fact, despite the excellent improvements I have seen in my local area, is that between 2022 and 2024 the overall rate of maternal death in the UK was 20% higher than it was from 2009 to 2011, when the Government of the day set an ambition to halve the rate of maternal mortality in England. Although the life of a precious baby is priceless, clinical negligence does have a price tag. The NHS has faced an estimated £27.4 billion bill for maternity negligence in England since 2019. That figure exceeds the total maternity budget for the same period, and reflects the devastating toll of preventable deaths and life-altering injuries to mothers and babies.

There has been significant investment in increasing the number of midwives over the past 18 months under this Labour Government, with an extra 800 midwives recruited since December 2024, but that is not enough on its own. As we have heard so sensibly from my colleagues, there needs to be widespread system change and a continuum of care.

We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) about the issues around black maternal health. The Health and Social Care Committee highlighted those issues in its inquiry, when we saw that black women in England continue to face disproportionately poor outcomes in maternity care and the highest maternal mortality rates. Babies born to black women are more than twice as likely to die in their first year, compared with babies born to white women—a fact that I find incredible in this day and age, as somebody who has worked in the NHS as a doctor and who is now a public health consultant. It is entirely unacceptable that that continues to be the case.

The task, therefore, is accountability and co-ordination, and ensuring that evidence-based recommendations drive rapid improvement for women, their babies and hard-working staff. The women’s health strategy, published last week, recognises that women’s birth experiences and outcomes are a fundamental aspect of high-quality healthcare. Maternity services need to be embedded in a model that is based on relationships and wider care. That is essentially what health services live or die on: if we do not have good relationships and good wider care, our health services will struggle.

How we organise our services also needs to change, and that is a core mission of our Government in shifting to community-based care and a neighbourhood health model. Some £200 million has been invested in the healthy babies programme to improve perinatal mental health, parent-infant relationships and infant feeding in 75 local authorities. That is part of the £900 million that has been allocated to Best Start family hubs. The best start in life campaign includes information on pregnancy, but we must ensure that maternity healthcare is fully embedded in the shift to neighbourhood care. Members should be in no doubt: we have talked about moving from hospital to community throughout the 20 years that I have been in public health and medicine, and we have yet to do it. So I am under no illusions that this is incredibly difficult, but the focus we have this time is welcome.

Considering the improvements that have been made in my own area by University Hospitals Sussex; the significant steps being taken by the Government in establishing the taskforce led by the Secretary of State; and the investment in midwives and, more broadly, in women’s health and community-based care, I think that positive action is starting to take hold. Following the publication of the Amos review, the Minister may want to consider the possibility of a maternity commissioner to carry out the work of the taskforce, but the primary driver of that decision must be the aim of embedding the progress that is being made now, and sustainably embedding across maternity services a safe, holistic, person-centred approach that can endure and adapt for many generations to come.