Baby Loss Awareness Week

Cat Smith Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Wyre) (Lab)]

I have never spoken in a Baby Loss Awareness Week debate before, but that does not mean that I do not care. I watched last year’s debate on the television, and I see that many of the faces that were there last year are here this year.

For the benefit of those watching, if an MP is not here and you have asked them to be here, let me say that it can often be quite difficult to talk about issues on which you feel that you have skin in the game, and that is certainly the case for me. When my local hospital, the Royal Lancaster infirmary, invited me to the opening of the new bereavement suite in the maternity unit earlier this year, I found a reason not to go. That was not because I was not glad that the room was there, but because I never wanted to see the inside of it. Unfortunately, in June this year, I did get to see the inside of it—not as an MP cutting the ribbon, but as a grieving parent.

The thing about miscarriage is that when you leave hospital, you do not have anything, apart from maybe some leaflets from the Miscarriage Association. Today I want to talk about baby loss certificates, because they are one thing that we can have and hold when we have nothing else of our babies. I will keep this quite tight. I want to set out some real issues with baby loss certificates. I believe that we can make policy changes that could make the situation better for parents. The eligibility criteria for the certificates in England are far stricter than those in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In England, people are required to have experienced the loss in England, and to be living in England when they apply, whereas in Scotland and Northern Ireland, people can apply if they live there or lived there at the time of the loss. That variation creates an inconsistency in what is available to parents across the UK.

There is another issue with cross-border access to certificates. Since the English scheme was launched, I have been made aware by Sands that families with bereaved parents who live in Wales, but who experienced their loss in an English hospital, have found that they were not eligible for the certificates. The charity’s concern is that once the Welsh certificate scheme finally launches, if the verification criteria are the same as the English criteria, it would require the parents to both live in Wales and have experienced the loss in Wales, so some parents would fall between the cracks, and would never be eligible for a baby loss certificate under either scheme.

There is also an inconsistency when parents do not live in the same part of the UK. That issue was raised in the Scottish Parliament’s debate on baby loss last week by my partner, David Linden MSP. The issue stems from the verification process, which uses NHS numbers and postcodes to confirm eligibility. However, that results in a problem whereby my baby loss certificates just have my name on them, as the mother; there is a blank where the father’s name should be—not because he does not want to be on the certificate, but because the system says no, as his postcode is “wrong”. We cannot have both parents’ names on a baby loss certificate when they live in different parts of the United Kingdom. David raised that issue last week in the Scottish Parliament, and the Scottish Health Minister Maree Todd said that she would take that forward with the Department of Health and Social Care. My only ask today is that the Secretary of State receives that request warmly. While it is not typical for a family to live across different nations in the United Kingdom, I hope that the Secretary of State will perhaps even reach out to Ministers in all the nations of the United Kingdom to ensure that where that is the case, families are eligible for baby loss certificates. When you are walking out of a hospital and the only thing you wanted was your baby, but all you have is loss, having that certificate is something tangible to hold on to and offers a huge amount of comfort. This is a “computer says no” administrative error, and fixing it would offer a lot of comfort to many families.