Baby Loss Awareness Week

Helen Morgan Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

I start by declaring my interests as a member and former co-chair of both the baby loss and maternity APPGs and a member of the birth trauma APPG, and by thanking the hon. 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 securing this important debate to mark Baby Loss Awareness Week. It has been an emotional evening listening to the contributions of Members across the House, who have either bravely shared their own stories and those of their constituents, or have worked incredibly hard to bring about improvements in maternity and neonatal care and in bereavement care for those families who face the loss of a baby and, in some cases, both those things.

Since I was elected in December 2021, far too many reports have come to Parliament that detail the unimaginable pain of families who have lost or had injured babies or mums. From Shrewsbury and Telford, which impacted families in my community, some of whom were my close friends, and which I have spoken about on a number of occasions in this place, through East Kent, Nottingham and the many hospitals included in the Amos review, and new inquiries into Leeds and Sussex, there have been many reports and far too little action. The silent scandal of this country’s maternity crisis has unfolded in plain sight. Maternal deaths are higher than at any point in the last decade, and 65% of maternity units are not rated as adequately safe by the CQC, which has warned that there is a risk of normalising serious harm in maternity care.

The latest Embrace UK report shows that women from black ethnic backgrounds are nearly three times as likely to die during or up to six weeks after pregnancy compared with women from white ethnic backgrounds, with women from Asian ethnic backgrounds also facing a slightly increased risk. Stillbirth rates for babies born to mothers living in the most deprived areas remain significantly higher than those in the least deprived areas. Women in the most deprived areas are also twice as likely to die during or shortly after pregnancy compared with those in the least deprived areas.

The 2015 national maternity safety ambition aimed to halve the 2010 rates of stillbirth, neonatal and maternal deaths, and brain injuries occurring during or soon after birth by 2025. We have missed the target on that, and targets for the future have not been set, and they must be. Every year, £1.3 billion is spent on medical negligence payments. We are spending the equivalent of a third of the whole maternity budget on the price of failure, rather than keeping mums and babies safe in the first place. We know that many experienced clinicians are leaving the profession, burnt out by exhaustion, the crumbling units they work in and the lack of time for training for the increasingly complex pregnancies and births that they must deal with.

I welcome the fact that the Government, despite there having been three Secretaries of State this year, have shown commitment to improving maternity services. Their agreement to create the statutory role of a maternity commissioner and to legislate for that in the Health Bill as it makes its way through the other place is undoubtedly a good step, and I thank the Secretary of State and the Minister for Secondary Care, the hon. Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth), for their constructive and collaborative approach to making that happen.

The Government have also established a maternity taskforce and commissioned Baroness Amos’s review—all welcome acknowledgment that improvement in maternity services should be of the highest priority. But there have unfortunately been missteps, too. Removing the ringfence from service development funding—the very fund designed to support enhanced care for complex pregnancies, multiple births and bereavement care and support—is incomprehensible in the light of the concerns that have been so widely raised, and I call on the Secretary of State to reinstate it.

Liberal Democrats have put improvements in maternity care at the heart of our work in this Parliament and have proposed a package to tackle the crisis, starting with safe staffing on every ward. Often, things go wrong at night or at weekends when the on-call consultant is at home—because, as we all know, babies have famously not grasped the importance of respecting normal working hours. We would ensure that a consultant obstetrician is present 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that one-to-one midwifery care for every woman in labour is available, so that the early signs of complication are recognised quickly.

Many pregnancies and births are more complex now. Training teams to deal with that is essential, and we call on the Government to introduce mandatory, regularly updated salaried training for all staff. For those in leadership roles, we would work on a culture of openness, learning from mistakes and speaking up when it is obvious that things are going wrong.

Many Members this evening have talked about better support throughout pregnancy, ensuring that high-risk mums have the right team around them from the start and that, crucially, women are listened to throughout their pregnancy. We would tackle the huge disparities in outcomes for black, Asian and disabled women and those from deprived backgrounds through better training to understand risk, alongside investment in the public health measures that are so critical to tackle some of the drivers of these disparities.

Finally, we urge the Government to recognise that, tragically, not every pregnancy goes to plan. We urge them to record all miscarriages so that the issue is no longer hidden, to support every woman who has had a miscarriage, not make them wait for their third one, and to invest in ensuring there is bereavement care for every family who needs it. There is, of course, undoubtedly a cost to all this, but it is less than half of that eye-watering medical negligence bill.

The Thirlwall inquiry highlights the failure of the NHS to learn from mistakes and implement recommendations from detailed investigations undertaken when things go wrong. It has highlighted how constant top-down reorganisations of the NHS have prevented progress and obscured the monitoring of improvements, and it says that a lack of political will has led to a failure to overcome the barriers to change for the better.

I have heard colleagues from all parties on both sides of the House agree on the urgent need to improve maternity services this evening, and I am encouraged by the steps that the Government have taken so far, but now it is time for action. I am ready to work with colleagues from all parties to tackle this crisis, and to ensure that no other family has to endure the pain of the avoidable loss of their beloved baby. I look forward to hearing from the Secretary of State that the Government have the political will to do the same.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call shadow Minister Dr Caroline Johnson.