Maternity Services

Helen Morgan Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Christopher. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) for securing this important debate and making such an excellent opening speech, in which she covered most of the ground that we need to cover.

It is important to acknowledge that the vast majority of babies arrive safely, despite the increasing number of complex pregnancies. My own experience of having a baby was 16 years ago, but I am sure that the thousands of women having babies now are having the same experience that I did. The staff of hospital maternity units make you feel simultaneously that you are the most important person ever to have given birth, and that you are the umpteenth person to have done so this week, they know exactly what they are doing and you can relax. I felt like that even when everything went wrong, which is a great testament to the professionalism of the staff at Wycombe general hospital all those years ago.

This is one of many debates on maternity services that I have attended in the last three years. The first followed the issuing of Donna Ockenden’s report on maternity services in Shrewsbury and Telford hospital trust, which serves my constituents, including Kayleigh and Colin Griffiths, who fought alongside Rhiannon Davies and Richard Stanton and others to give a voice to the many families who suffered as a result of the failings at the trust. But that was not the first scandal in NHS maternity services—Morecambe Bay had already been investigated and reported on by Dr Bill Kirkup—and, tragically, it was not the last either. Dr Kirkup has reviewed significant failings at East Kent, and Donna Ockenden is currently investigating a huge number of incidents at Nottingham. We have also heard the concerns of the hon. Members for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tom Rutland) and for Leeds North West (Katie White) about the state of services in Sussex and Leeds. I am sure that Members across the House are concerned that the tragedy at Shrewsbury and Telford will not be the last.

It makes me quite angry to say that that is not a surprise. We have heard that 65% of trusts were rated inadequate or requiring improvement when it comes to safety in maternity services in the latest CQC survey. That is despite the previous Government’s commitments from the Dispatch Box, which I believe were made in good faith, to deal with unsafe staffing levels and bring about cultural change across the country. The lack of action is unacceptable. Donna Ockenden described the Conservative Government as being “asleep at the wheel” when it came to making progress on the 15 immediate and essential actions she recommended for the whole of England in March 2022, despite their having accepted all those actions.

Each of the reviews into these heartbreaking tragedies has found the same recurring themes: poor management of incidents when things go wrong and, critically, a failure to learn from them, which is indicative of defensive management culture and sometimes toxic working arrangements, including a feeling among staff that they do not have the freedom to speak out and, when they do, inadequate protection for whistleblowers; failure to ensure safe and timely assessment at triage; reluctance to acknowledge the need for medicalisation for a C-section when one is in the best interests of the mother; unsuitable estates and a lack of access to equipment, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire); and, underpinning all these issues, unsafe staffing levels.

That last point is really important, because staff are experiencing burnout. They are leaving the service in high numbers, and are unable to deliver the care that they really want to deliver to mothers at their most vulnerable moment. There are no excuses now—the issues have been identified time and again—but there is evidence that we are going backwards on maternity care. The 2015 national maternity safety ambition to halve rates of stillbirths and neonatal and maternal deaths by 2025 has stalled and is unlikely to be met this year.

There is a shocking disparity of outcomes between different ethnic groups. Black women are more than twice as likely to die than white ones, and other ethnic groups also carry an unacceptably high risk. No one really understands why; there has been no research into it. There are clear links to deprivation, because people in deprived areas also carry a much higher risk, but translation difficulties, certain health conditions and, shamefully, even racism may all play a part in this shocking disparity. The women’s health strategy for England proposed to address these disparities, but it is impossible to point to any measurable progress. Poor maternity care can have a devastating impact on families, and it makes no sense for the taxpayer either. As we have heard, 60% of the value of clinical negligence claims is related to maternity services, and that costs more than £1 billion a year. It makes no sense not to address these issues.

It is important to acknowledge the work of charities such as Sands and Tommy’s and the work of a number of APPGs in this place over the last few years, including the baby loss, maternity, and birth trauma APPGs, all of which I was involved in. They have campaigned tirelessly for safe staffing levels and to improve care across England, and indeed the UK. This debate relates to England because health is a devolved matter, but the whole of the UK must strive to become the safest place in the world to have a baby.

Addressing disparities in obstetric care is essential for a fair society. The immediate and essential actions of the Ockenden report must be implemented at once, because if they are not, more families will face the trauma of a birth injury or worse. The actions included a commitment to safe staffing, and in 2022 the Government made a significant investment in staffing; it is essential that that is continued. The commitments made in the workforce plan must be backed by adequate funding, and include expansion of the wider maternity and neonatal workforce. The UK Government must renew the national maternity ambitions beyond 2025 to include all four nations, and include a clear baseline to measure progress. They must also address this critical issue of health disparities. In her 2022 report into Shrewsbury and Telford hospital trust, Donna Ockenden said:

“The impact of death or serious health complications suffered as a result of maternity care cannot be underestimated. The impact on the lives of families and loved ones is profound and permanent.”

In my first debate on this subject, in March 2022—the day that report was issued—everyone in the Chamber contributing said that the scandal at Shrewsbury and Telford should be the last. It was not. I hope the Minister will today commit to a strategy to ensure that maternity care scandals are ended on the watch of this Government.