Baby Loss

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

I welcome this important debate, and I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh) and for Rossendale and Darwen (Andy MacNae), and the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt), for bringing to the House, during Baby Loss Awareness Week, this debate on a grief that touches thousands, who often grieve in silence.

I will use this debate to call for a UK-wide perinatal death reduction programme, and will talk about foetal growth restriction monitoring. I am really glad that the Secretary of State for Health is in the Chamber; that shows his commitment. This debate is well timed to inform the rapid review of maternity and neonatal safety in England.

For many, baby loss is invisible and misunderstood. This week breaks that silence, honours lives cut short and stands with families who carry their babies’ memory every day. Like other Members, I pay tribute to charities like Sands, Tommy’s and the Miscarriage Association. Their work must be supported and recognised.

I speak with a heavy heart to share the story of Maia Devlin Corfield, a beautiful baby girl who should be here today. Her parents Sherena and Jack came to my advice surgery to tell me about Maia’s stillbirth at Kingston hospital. Though Sherena’s pregnancy was low risk, Maia showed signs of growth restriction. Staff reassured Sherena but failed to act. Maia was born still on 29 November 2024. The autopsy showed she was healthy, but died due to a placental condition that halted her growth and breathing.

Babies with growth issues like Maia are eight times more likely to die, and it was Kingston’s foetal growth monitoring system that failed her. It diverged from national standards and, despite early warnings, many unsafe practices like that remain. The Government’s own maternity and neonatal safety investigation into Maia’s death made nine recommendations, yet risks still persist and are not listened to. Sherena and Jack often feel that they are not being listened to, but bereaved parents need to be heard because by listening to them, we can identify those areas that need to change. It is that culture and the regulation and standards that all need to work together to see real change.

Freedom of information requests by Sherena and Jack have revealed that at least 27 trusts cannot properly identify babies with growth issues. The issue is that many hospitals use a global growth monitoring system that under-detects small babies in high-income countries like the UK because it uses data from across the world. Safer UK-developed systems based on NHS data do exist and are used by many units, but Maia was failed by outdated growth charts still in use at Kingston and St George’s and at many other hospitals. A key part of the system is those growth charts. Donald Peebles, NHS England’s clinical director for maternity, has confirmed that a national safety alert will soon advise trusts to stop using these intergrowth charts, but is there a system to track which hospitals still use them, and how can we update foetal growth monitoring systems urgently?

I have also talked to the chief nurse for the South West London integrated care board, who highlighted issues of midwife retention and recruitment and, in particular, maternity triage, which needs reform with a universal standard that would ensure consistency of safety and access—those early warning systems that failed Maia and are failing others. Just as we have a mental health investment standard, we should consider a similar maternity services standard as well.

I turn to the demands for change. The “Saving Babies’ Lives Care Bundle” published by NHS England in June 2023 outlines three key elements for foetal growth monitoring, but they are not consistently adopted and then monitored to ensure that they are implemented. There are too few of those deaths in each trust to rely on the trust to take the action; it has to be done at a national level. In fact, it has to be done across every nation—Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England—otherwise there will be inconsistencies as there already are between the different nations. Will the Minister work with counterparts across the UK to ensure that no nation falls behind? Will the Minister meet Sherena and Jack to discuss how to improve maternity care and look at the findings they have? We owe it to Maia. We owe it to every family shattered by preventable baby loss to demand accountability, enforce standards and ensure that no parent is ever told that everything is fine when it is not.

Non-surgical Aesthetic and Cosmetic Treatments

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Thursday 11th September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship today, Sir Desmond. I welcome this debate and congratulate the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) on securing it. I agree with much of what he said, especially the issues about negative body image and the harm being done. I welcome the Government action that was announced recently. The announcement on 5 August of the forthcoming consultation and crackdown on unsafe cosmetic procedures is very welcome. The last Government did not do enough in this area, despite my pushing on one particular area of it, so I am glad that this Government are taking action. I look forward to hearing more about those actions from the Minister.

I am here because in 2022 my constituent, Jan Spivey, came to my surgery with a lot to say. She was one of those surgery appointments where someone bursts into the room. She had so much to say that I had to encourage her to take a moment to sit down. She had been campaigning for a very long time on the Poly Implant Prothèse breast implant scandal, something that I have been raising ever since on behalf of Jan, who has been so affected by this personally, and on behalf of all the women across the UK. Up to 47,000 women have been affected by the scandal. It has really opened up to me the dreadful issues of surgical and non-surgical cosmetic treatments that need to be addressed. I welcome the comments from the hon. Member for Bromsgrove about how this is about cosmetic and non-cosmetic surgery. If we do not tackle one and get the regulation right for one side of it, we will not get it right for both sides, and they are really important.

The company Poly Implant Prothèse, or PIP, was founded in France. It began distributing breast implants made from non-medical silicone, and it was later found that what had been put into the breast implants was basically mattress filler. The implants were far more likely to rupture and lead to long-term health conditions: they were found to have a 500% higher risk of rupturing or leaking and a direct link to a rare form of cancer.

In 2010, PIP pre-emptively liquidated, but between 2001 and 2010, 400,000 people globally and 47,000 people in the UK received PIP breast implants. Many of those in the UK probably received them through implant surgery in another country. In 2011, following the death of a woman from the rare cancer, the French Government recommended that 30,000 women in France seek the removal of their breast implants, and removals were carried out. A criminal trial was held, and the founder of PIP was sent to prison for four years.

In 2022, my constituent Jan came to talk to me about the health issues that she had faced as a result of these implants. She said that doctors were not listening to her. That is a pattern for both non-cosmetic and cosmetic treatments: going to the doctor, being told, “You’re an older woman; it’s menopause”—for younger women it might be ME or something else—and being written off. That is why we are discussing this matter today: for a long time women with these issues have not been listened to.

There is an accountability gap. Many of the private healthcare providers that implanted those breast implants declared themselves bankrupt but then restarted, in the same premises under a similar name. There is also a data gap, because there is no good register of who received these implants. That is also the case with many other non-cosmetic treatments. Who is receiving these treatments and who is doing them? We need to know.

In 2023, I secured a debate in the House to discuss this matter, but I felt that it was pushed aside by the responding Minister. The Minister agreed to produce implant cards with more information about the risks of having an implant put in, but did not agree to tell all the affected women what might be happening in their own bodies and why they were experiencing so many health issues—that it might be because of breast implants—or to remove them and solve the issue.

The PIP scandal is not an isolated event; it is part of a broader, systemic failure in the regulation of medical devices. Both the UK and global systems have long-standing structural weaknesses that create recurring cycles. That is why I am glad that this debate has been secured and the matter brought to the attention of the Minister. There is inadequate pre-market oversight, excessive commercial secrecy, under-researched women’s health impacts, regulatory capture, financial conflicts and poor post-market surveillance. Who are the women affected? Where are they? What is happening to them? Patient compensation mechanisms are weak, and as I have said, women are routinely not taken seriously when they raise these issues.

The key asks from the PIP campaigners are for the Minister to work with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, which has absolutely failed them in this instance, and the NHS to recognise and publicise the risks associated with PIP breast implants. If there is a link between breast implants and health issues, the data should be easy to find. The Minister should urge the NHS to collect data to establish how many people have received these implants and how many have had them removed, and to proactively contact everyone affected through their GPs to give them advice. The Government should also conduct a review into the risks associated with PIP breast implants.

I welcome the fact that the Women and Equalities Committee has begun an inquiry into this matter. I hope that the Minister will look closely at the outcomes of that inquiry—I am sure she will. I would welcome the Minister meeting me and PIP campaigners—I am sure that she will find Jan as inspiring and informative as I have—to discuss what actions can be taken to right this injustice and improve the health of thousands of women.