Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Bill

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 15th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)]

After such a smooth start, it is good to see you in your place, Madam Deputy Speaker. It provides me with an opportunity to thank you for and congratulate you on your flawless oversight and running of the private Members’ Bill ballot. Indeed, you showed impeccable taste even when picking numbers out of the hat. Seriously, however, you can be very pleased with the range of Bills before Parliament today.

I also welcome the new Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt), to her place and wish her well. I was grateful to meet her predecessor and his officials to discuss the Bill and work together on it, and I appreciate the new Minister having ensured that that work can continue in the week since her appointment. I hope that she is as enthusiastic about this Bill as both her predecessor and I am—I am sure she will be and, from our first discussions, I know that she definitely is.

We should all be enthusiastic about this brilliant Bill, which I know will make such a huge difference to tens of thousands of families each and every year. That is because it paves the way for the introduction of neonatal care leave and pay. I am grateful to all the hon. Members in the Chamber for being here to consider this proposal and, I very much hope, to support it. We will never be able to get rid of the stress, anxiety, doubts, questions and trauma that so many families experience when their baby is in neonatal care, but what we can and must do is help to relieve some of the practical and financial challenges that accompany that experience.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

I am delighted to see the Bill come to the Floor of the House, and I know that other hon. Members have sought to bring it previously and have done a huge amount of work in this area. I hope that the Government put their full weight behind it. My constituent Coady Dorman does a lot of work with Bliss, as my hon. Friend will know. She had a premature son, Matthew. He is now thriving, but she spoke about the months she spent going to see him in neonatal care and how different the experience was, and how different maternity leave was after that. She told of the stress and strain of having to worry about money all during that time. My hon. Friend’s Bill will, we hope, take away some of that stress.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. Hearing about those experiences is precisely what has prompted my bringing this Bill forward today. Campaigns groups such as Bliss and The Smallest Things, which I will come to in a moment, have really driven this forward. As she alluded to, there are Members in the Chamber today with personal experience of having a baby in neonatal care, which makes them the best advocates for this cause so I am grateful for their participation. Many of them, such as my hon. Friends the Members for Glasgow East (David Linden) and for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands), and the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Luke Hall), have been passionate and articulate campaigners for reform for a considerable time.

I am pleased to say that we are joined in the Gallery today by people from Bliss and The Smallest Things, representing families who have direct experience of the challenges around neonatal care; I am immensely grateful to them and so many other organisations and individuals for their help and support in taking this Bill forward and for the campaign they have been driving since long before I was elected to this place. I hope that the families with lived experience of neonatal care who are watching today will be satisfied that we have represented the issues they have faced, and are facing now, with the careful consideration and compassion they deserve.

The Office for National Statistics reports that an estimated 100,000 babies every year across the UK are admitted to neonatal care following their birth. Many of those babies spend prolonged periods of time on a neonatal care unit in a hospital as a result of being born prematurely or with other health conditions. That is, of course, an incredibly worrying and stressful time for parents, and their extended families. All our hearts go out to everyone who has found themselves in that position. Parents will naturally want to be able to focus their attention simply on getting through that period, supporting each other and their newborn. There is an emotional imperative to be with their babies, but there is also a practical one: those vulnerable, little children need their parents, and those parents need to be with their wee ones. As the charity Bliss has highlighted,

“parental presence on a neonatal unit is essential. Babies have the best developmental outcomes when their parents can deliver hands-on care.”

However, some families struggle to do that while keeping in employment and earning a living. Fathers get two weeks of statutory paternity leave. That is good, but when those two weeks run out, they must be called back to work while their baby is still in hospital. How can any parent be expected to focus at work while their sick baby is undergoing life-saving, life-changing neonatal care?

When babies have an extended stay in hospital at the start of their life, mothers report that 39 weeks of paid maternity leave does not give them enough time. That gets used up during the neonatal care and they do not feel that they have enough time at home with their baby before they need to go back to work. Some mothers may choose to leave work as a result. Indeed, research by The Smallest Things shows that one in 10 mothers were not able to return to work due to the ongoing needs of their babies who had required neonatal care.

That research also highlights two incredibly concerning statistics, which are perhaps unsurprising given the emotional trauma of a baby being born premature or sick. The charity reports that 77% of parents said they experienced anxiety after neonatal care, and that nearly a quarter had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after neonatal intensive care. In short, The Smallest Things concludes that we need to strengthen the statutory rights and support offered to these parents because that

“would give parents the emotional and financial support needed at a time of great stress and trauma – in turn leading to better postnatal health, a more positive return to work and better outcomes for children born prematurely.”

--- Later in debate ---

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald). When I told him that he had come top of the private Member’s Bills ballot, he thought that I was just someone who was interested, notwithstanding what happened earlier. It was actually because I was so keen to see this Bill come forward. This is a Bill that I sought to introduce in 2018 via the ten-minute rule. It is a testament to how generous and warm my hon. Friend is that he has been presented with this opportunity by winning the parliamentary lottery. Many of us would like to see the private Member’s Bill process reformed, but I am incredibly grateful to him and will be forever in his debt that he has taken the Bill on.

Like my hon. Friend, I pay tribute to the former Minister, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully). He and I have been discussing and meeting about this issue. I have questioned him on the Floor of the House for a very long time about it. It became clear that, in the absence of an employment Bill, the most sensible way of dealing with it, particularly given the cross-party support we have, was to decouple it and take this as a stand-alone Bill. I am glad we are going down that route.

I would like to pay tribute to and recognise a few other people, particularly Catriona Ogilvy from The Smallest Things, and Josie Anderson and Beth McCleverty from Bliss. I have been working with them for years on this, and the fact that we are finally seeing the Bill go through the House is a point of enormous pride. It is the culmination of many years of work by not just MPs, which I will come to in a moment, but, most importantly, parents whose children are born premature or sick.

This is actually politics at its best. It is no secret that I am not a fan of this place, and I do everything every single day to try to get out of here, but if the House will indulge me for one moment, this is probably one of the best moments we have had here, because we are seeing politicians coming together, putting party politics aside and using their personal experience.

One of the reasons the all-party parliamentary group on premature and sick babies works so well is that the officers of that group all have one thing in common. It is not the fact that they are Members of Parliament; it is that they are the parents of premature and sick-born babies. I want to thank the hon. Members for Thornbury and Yate (Luke Hall) and for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands), and the hon. Members for Broxtowe (Darren Henry) and for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), who have come together to put party politics and indeed constitutional politics aside to ensure that we do deliver for those families.

This Bill is not particularly controversial. It is a relatively short Bill and the budget line only commits to about £15 million, as the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate said, in the 2023 Budget, but it will have a massive impact on the families of those 90,000 to 100,000 babies who every year are born in the UK and spend time in neonatal care.

As the House will recall, both of my children—Isaac and Jessica—were born premature. In Isaac’s case, we only had about 14 weeks from finding out that he was going to arrive to his coming into the world. I still remember that moment when it moved to an emergency caesarean and being whipped away to a neonatal intensive care unit, and the real worry going through that time. In both cases—for both my children—my parental leave was well up by the time we got out of hospital. In the case of my daughter Jessica, who is now three years old, she spent roughly the first year of her life on oxygen and many weeks and months in the neonatal intensive care unit.

The hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate hit the nail on the head when he talked about the mental health impact that this has on parents. I still remember vividly, and will until my dying day, watching my daughter turn blue in the incubator, with noises, alarms and lights all going off and neonatal nurses rushing in to resuscitate her. The idea that we as legislators would expect our constituents to be at work when that is happening or, worse still, to do a shift after that is something we are putting right today, because that is a historical wrong.

There is also the point that employers will not get the best out of their employees when they are sitting at work and staring into space, worrying whether or not their child is going to make it through the day. They are also not going to be in a good space when they realise that mum is back in the neonatal intensive care ward and doctors are coming round to talk about the massive consequential decisions that families have to take, while the dad, or another parent perhaps, is sitting in front of a computer in the office. That is why this is so important.

There are, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East has said, good employers out there already: Sony Music, Waltham Forest Council, South Ayrshire Council all have innovative policies in place. Interestingly, we have a big debate in this House about proxy voting. As far as I understand it, proxy voting still does not have provision for neonatal care leave. Although there will be a period before we can get Royal Assent, this House could get its own house in order by ensuring that we have some form of neonatal leave immediately with proxy voting.

[Hannah Bardell]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the excellent work he has done over many years on this issue. My own chief of staff, Stephanie, had her twin girls—Abi and Jessica—during the deepest, darkest lockdown of the winter of 2020. She had the pressure of having two premature babies, being quite ill and having to go in and out of the neonatal unit. So much of what he says rings true, and I hope I did what I could as an employer, but I felt that my hands were tied by the rules of this place. I remember trying to give her all the support I could, but her partner worked offshore and had to go back offshore; he could not even be in the same place as her after that. Does my hon. Friend agree that everything he says and everything this Bill brings forward will be so important to our constituents, our staff and staff the length and breadth of the country? It should not be left up to individual businesses to make policies; this needs to be in legislation.

[David Linden]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. As well as reforming some of the issues around proxy voting in this place, which I accept impacts only a small amount of us, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, which is responsible for setting many of the policies and conditions on how Members of the House employ staff, could do a lot more not just on guidance but to reform the rules.

There are a number of good employers out there—I have mentioned them already—but one thing we saw as a result of the P&O scandal is that, sadly, far too many employers are too tempted to gild the lily, cut corners and undercut their staff. I am conscious that there is cross-party consensus this morning, but I will not depart from the belief that the sooner we have an employment Bill before the House, the better so we could try to deal with some of the other issues, such as the excellent proposition on miscarriage leave made by my hon. Friend the Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley). It is important that the Minister considers how we could bring forward an employment Bill. However, ultimately, this Bill will end the lottery that far too many employees across these islands have to deal with. I agree with the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate about the need to expedite the Bill. I still have a concern that, although the Bill will be read a Second time today, we should get it into Committee as soon as possible, and to the Lords. My preference would be to do all stages on the Floor of the House. There is precedent for that. Given the immense cross-party agreement on this, we could get the Bill through in a couple of hours.

I put a direct challenge to whoever the two final candidates are for Prime Minister. I understand that whoever becomes Prime Minister will be enormously tempted to call a snap election. The danger with doing that is that the House would prorogue and the Bill would not receive Royal Assent. I would like a commitment from both candidates that they will not play fast and loose with that.

There are many more things that we can do to try to support families who have had premature or sick babies. We need to look at the neonatal workforce. That is a ticking time bomb that will go off in about 10 years’ time. We need to look at the school admissions code, certainly in England, and look across the UK at the poor hospital accommodation for parents. Far too many parents have to stay in hotels well off site. That is particularly challenging for mothers who are breastfeeding and there are all sorts of other issues. My hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East referred to the neonatal expenses fund that we have in Scotland. We are incredibly lucky to have that, but it is not available to our friends in other parts of these islands.

Finally, we will have to look at the postcode lottery and the desert of counselling that exists across health boards and NHS trusts. It has been well rehearsed this morning that having a baby who is born premature or sick can have a serious detrimental impact on the mental health of parents and frankly it is just luck whether they get that support at that time. I very much look forward to the Bill going to Committee, ensuring that it passes through the House speedily and can receive Royal Assent. I commend it to the House.