Future of the Post Office
Helen Morgan Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Gareth Thomas
I hope my hon. Friend will forgive me, but I am not aware of the exact circumstances in his constituency, though I am happy to meet him to talk through them, if he thinks that would be useful. As I hope I have set out, we remain absolutely committed to ensuring that every community has good access to a post office branch and all the services that it provides. That is as true for his constituents as it is for the constituents of Members across the House.
Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
Oswestry in my constituency is the second largest town in Shropshire and serves a vast rural area stretching into mid-Wales and across north Shropshire. It is digitally excluded because it often does not have adequate mobile signal or broadband services, so the full range of Crown post office services are absolutely essential there. Will the Minister assure me that the full range of Crown post office services will remain in Oswestry, and that the Post Office will take into account the importance of retaining vital services in rural areas, which are being deserted by commercial organisations such as banks?
Gareth Thomas
I am absolutely clear that the Government recognise and accept our continuing responsibility to ensure that post office services are available to every community across the UK, and that there is easy access to a post office branch in rural and urban areas alike; we remain absolutely committed to that. As I said, no decision has been taken to close any individual directly managed branch, but it is right that the Post Office considers all its costs if we are to achieve an increase in sub-postmaster pay. In that regard, and on the hon. Lady’s wider point, it is important that the Post Office management consults properly—previous management teams have not always done so—with sub-postmasters, trade unions and other stakeholders.
Oral Answers to Questions
Helen Morgan Excerpts(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)
I remind Members to speak through the Chair.
Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
The Minister for Trade Policy and Economic Security (Mr Douglas Alexander)
I assure the hon. Lady that the SPS agreement—the veterinary agreement, as it is called—is one of the priorities we are pursuing. That matter is being led by the Cabinet Office, as is the reset with the European Union. I assure her that dialogue is under way between the Department for Business and Trade, the Cabinet Office and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It is a priority. It will take time to reset, but I assure her that we are fully aware of the urgency.
Post Office Horizon Scandal
Helen Morgan Excerpts(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Kevin Hollinrake
I do not think that is an accurate portrayal of events at all. I am very happy to talk to the hon. Member about that particular issue. It was decided that Henry Staunton was no longer the right person to lead the Post Office. He then decided to make some allegations about what happened during his tenure, which have proven, in my view, to be completely false. I do not believe that Mr Staunton is a whistleblower. He spoke out, but I think the allegations he made have been clearly demonstrated to be not accurate. What the hon. Gentleman has just said is not an accurate portrayal of events. The No. 1 thing we should all focus on now is ensuring that people are properly compensated, that the inquiry is allowed to do its work and identifies those responsible, and that those responsible—be they individuals or corporates—are held to account.
Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
I have a constituent who was part of the group litigation order. They were not convicted, because the process was paused in 2015, but they have pretty much lost everything, having borrowed substantial amounts of money to make up the shortfall over a long period of time. They have now been told that the £75,000 up-front payment would be net of any interim payment that they have received. They are not confident to go forward with the full assessment, because of some of the highly publicised very low—derisory—compensations that have been offered. Can the Minister offer my constituent any reassurance that it is worthwhile pursuing that extensive and independently assessed claim? My assessment is that they have lost significantly more than £75,000.
Kevin Hollinrake
If that is the case, they should definitely submit a claim. I am very happy to meet the hon. Lady to talk about her particular constituent. I am aware that some individuals have come forward and said that they received derisory offers. We urge them to engage with the rest of the process, which has not yet happened. There is an independent panel for the GLO scheme. Again, I would direct her to the actual performance of the GLO compensation scheme so far: 58 full claims received; 48 offers made; and 41 offers accepted without reference to the independent panel, which would tend to indicate that the offers being made are fair. However, I do understand that the people affected by this will not be satisfied by my assurances until they have gone through the process. I urge her to tell her constituent to do exactly that.
Oral Answers to Questions
Helen Morgan Excerpts(10 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Ms Ghani
I am more than happy to sit down with the hon. Member to discuss furthering his case, but the overriding fact, which he mentioned, is that the decision sits with the Scottish Government. In the UK we have the National Shipbuilding Office, which provides a wraparound service not only to secure contracts but to ensure that ships are built in UK shipyards.
Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
The Minister for Trade Policy (Greg Hands)
Of course I shall be happy to meet the hon. Lady, but let me remind her of what I said earlier. The border operating model was introduced after extensive consultation with businesses, led by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs with the agrifood sector. There has been plenty of opportunity for feedback from businesses, but I shall be happy to meet the hon. Lady to discuss specific cases.
Birth Trauma
Helen Morgan Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
I thank the hon. Members for Stafford (Theo Clarke) and for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) for bringing forward the debate. The hon. Member for Stafford gave an excellent speech; it was brave but also extremely thorough. Given that a similar debate will follow shortly, I will restrict my comments to one specific area: my experience of having a baby. That was nearly 15 years ago, which is quite a long time ago, and I am pleased to report that my baby is now a healthy young man who is already significantly bigger than me. But my experience of his birth, and specifically the attitudes to the use of a caesarean section both generally in society and in the medical profession caused me concern.
I was induced at 12 days overdue at about 9 on a Friday morning, and my baby was delivered by emergency caesarean just before 10 on Saturday night, which I think we can all appreciate was quite a long time later. Various professionals looked after me during that time. They were invariably caring, humorous and competent. They had a good laugh at my birth plan and chucked it away and, when they had given up all hope of what they described as a “natural delivery”, I was wheeled across the corridor to a theatre and had the necessary procedure. That all went very well. I was very tired but happy and luckily my baby was making his views on the situation known at enormous volume. I was sent home after just a few days’ stay in hospital.
It was after I got home that things started to feel different for me. People kept expressing sympathy. The final straw was when a health visitor asked if I felt like a failure for having had a C-section. The answer really was, “Not until somebody suggested that maybe I should.” The medical evidence is clear that, if a vaginal delivery is possible, it is usually a superior option. I am not here to deny that, but I do think that we should take a look at attitudes to women who have had or needed a C-section because that was medically the best option for them.
I have a degree in history and chose to specialise where possible in medieval and early modern social and economic issues. I hope to God that my in-depth knowledge of the societal impact of the bubonic plague is never useful to me, but after my baby was born I found myself reflecting on historians’ best estimates of maternal and baby death in that era. It is possible that one in 10 pregnancies ended in the death of the mother, and the proportion of babies who died in those early days was obviously far higher. At the time, I found the reflection that, even 200 years ago, probably neither me nor my son would have survived extremely sobering and shocking.
Surely, given the amazing advances in modern medicine, we should celebrate that that is a statistic firmly consigned to history. Surely the only important objective when you arrive at hospital in excited anticipation of the arrival of your baby is that both you and your baby leave that hospital in a healthy state. I am afraid that the expectations of pregnant women are greater than that—that real women are expected not to rely on medical advances that have saved millions of lives over the last couple of hundred years but to have their baby without pain relief and without intervention, if possible without making too much noise—and definitely enjoying an empowering moment. Obviously that is total garbage: you are at your most vulnerable, both physically and emotionally, and then after what is potentially a traumatic and painful experience, you start the endurance test of caring for your new-born baby on zero hours’ sleep for probably the next four or five months.
Personally, having failed at being an earth mother, I found the first year of motherhood very difficult. I was sleep deprived and attempting to feed the world’s hungriest baby—this was not the fairy tale that I had imagined at all—but I was doing better than some of my friends. One friend had had what was described as a “natural” delivery. Her baby arrived six weeks before mine, but the consultant apparently did not like C-sections. Her baby was delivered in distress with forceps. She suffered terrible tearing and, in the end, despite my having undergone major abdominal surgery, I was discharged before her. I am not an expert, but at the time it seemed to me that a C-section may have been a better outcome for her.
Another friend suffered a long and uneventful labour similar to mine. Again, the consultant did not like C-sections, so she ended up delivering her daughter with a last-minute smash-and-grab with a pair of forceps. Her baby was resuscitated on arrival and removed to the special care unit. My friend suffered flashbacks for years afterwards. Compared with that—I could not drive for four weeks, but overall I felt okay—I felt that my experience was superior. I was therefore particularly horrified when the Ockenden report was issued last year to see that a reluctance to perform C-sections was one of the factors in the failings of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust. In fact, it was generally considered on a nationwide basis to be a huge success not to use this lifesaving option wherever possible.
There are undoubtedly women who have experienced unnecessary trauma or worse because of a reluctance to use a C-section. I fear that what lies behind that reluctance is a failure to listen to women when they are having their babies and when they know what options would be best for them at that time. We celebrate advances in modern medicine and advances that save lives. I am not entirely sure why we do not fully celebrate the advance of a C-section. As I said, the objective when a woman is having her baby is to ensure that they both leave the hospital and arrive home in as good a state as possible. We must urge everyone in society and in the medical profession to ensure that that is their top priority.
Baby Loss Awareness Week
Helen Morgan Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered Baby Loss Awareness Week.
I thank the Backbench Business Committee and all those who have supported this important debate. In particular, I thank the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake), who, unfortunately and unexpectedly, has been unable to attend. She sends her apologies to Mr Speaker for that. I also wish to thank the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory), my co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on baby loss. She is a font of inspiration, guidance and support, and I thank her for that. I joined the APPG shortly after being elected and became its co-chair earlier this year. I joined because many of my constituents had suffered the loss of a baby at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, and the Ockenden report on systemic failings there revealed that many women—indeed, whole families in Shropshire and the surrounding area—had suffered a devastating loss that was avoidable.
Baby Loss Awareness Week—which took place last week, while we were still in recess, but which we are marking with this debate—is an important moment to support any family who has lost their baby and to ask ourselves whether anything more can be done to prevent other families suffering this heartbreak. This time last year we debated the findings of the Ockenden report—most importantly, the need for safe staffing levels in maternity units across the country. One year on, I ask the Minister to update us specifically on the progress made and on the outlook for maternity services and safe levels of staffing in the future. Unfortunately, since the debate last year we have been starkly reminded that poor maternity care was not restricted to Shropshire. Dr Bill Kirkup has reported on his findings at East Kent and Donna Ockenden is currently reviewing issues at Nottingham, which threaten to be on an even greater scale than those at Shrewsbury and Telford.
Each time a scandal emerges, we promise ourselves that it will be the last time, but tragically that has not been the case so far. Far from being a localised issue, it seems that maternity services have been experiencing a crisis nationally. In 2022, 38% of maternity services were rated by the Care Quality Commission as inadequate or requiring improvement. The avoidable death of a baby is something we should be working to eliminate.
Earlier this year, I attended the launch of the joint report by Sands and Tommy’s joint policy unit on progress on saving babies’ lives. The headline of that report is that the Government are not on track to meet their target of halving stillbirths, maternal deaths, neonatal deaths and serious brain injury from their 2010 levels by 2025, and there is no target for further improvement beyond 2025. The report also showed that in 2021 there were 13 babies per day who were stillborn or died within the first 28 days of life across the UK. In 2021-22, nearly a fifth of stillbirths were found to have been potentially avoidable if better care had been provided, and two thirds of action plans created following the death of a baby are rated as weak. Too often, avoidable losses continue to occur as a result of care that is not in line with National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidance. For example, data for England show that 40% of women and birthing people do not attend their antenatal assessment before 10 weeks’ gestation, as is recommended in the NICE guidelines.
Research must be the key to improving outcomes and saving more babies’ lives in the future, yet relatively little is invested in pregnancy-related research. For every £1 spent on maternity care in the NHS, only 1p is spent on pregnancy research. Worse, health inequalities are stark when we look at baby loss. Black babies are twice as likely to die in their first 28 days as white babies, and black ethnicity is associated with a 43% higher rate of miscarriage than white ethnicity. In England and Wales, in 2021 the stillbirth rate for women from the black African ethnic group was seven per 1,000 births, which would have to reduce by more than 60% in four years to meet the 2025 overall population target of 2.6 per 1,000 births. Stillbirths are almost double the level among people living in deprived areas in the UK than they are among those in the least deprived areas.
There is also a real lack of evidence in this area. Much of the national data is based on aggregated ethnic groups or broad categories of deprivation, which provide limited insights into individual lives. Despite the Government’s commitment to levelling up, there are no national targets and no long-term funding for reducing inequalities between ethnic groups or areas of deprivation. I know that the Minister has read that report and engaged seriously with these issues, and I urge her to consider its recommendations in full.
My constituents Kayleigh and Colin Griffiths, along with Rhiannon Davies and Richard Stanton from Telford, campaigned tirelessly for the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust review, and I was pleased that they were each awarded an MBE earlier this year in recognition of their efforts to ensure that parents’ voices were heard and that babies born in future would be safer. They have reflected on the new concerns that have come to light and have written to the Secretary of State to request a public inquiry into maternity services in England, given the apparently alarming scale of the national problem. Unfortunately, they have not yet received a response to that letter. Will the Minister confirm whether the Secretary of State will be replying to that letter, and whether the Government will consider nationwide action to fully understand why maternity services have come under so much pressure and how to prevent avoidable baby deaths in future?
We should always remember that these are not statistics but the horrific experiences of women at their most vulnerable. A constituent wrote to me this week following her own experience at Shrewsbury and Telford, one about which Donna Ockenden’s team concluded that different management would reasonably have been expected to have made a difference to the outcome. My constituent said:
“My son was born 10 days overdue on 7th August 2007 in Shrewsbury hospital. Unfortunately, due to gross negligence by the trust that day I left their hospital with empty arms and a broken heart.”
Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust accepted all the findings of the Ockenden report and regularly reports its progress against the recommendations. I am in regular contact with the trust’s team, and they reported that 75% of the recommendations in the report had been delivered and assured, and that there is good progress on the remainder. Of the recommendations in the earlier first report, 88% have been implemented and assured, and I have also received assurances that staffing levels in the maternity service are at an acceptable level. However, Donna Ockenden also recommended immediate and essential actions for the whole of the UK in both her first and second reports. I hope the Minister will be able to provide us with an update on progress on those actions, particularly on safe staffing, training and culture within the maternity service.
I also want to consider those awful circumstances where the loss of a baby is unavoidable and the cause often unknown. In 2021, the cause of 33% of stillbirths and 7% of neonatal deaths was unclear. The all-party group on baby loss has heard devastating evidence from parents who have been left in limbo for months or even years waiting to find out why their baby died, because of a desperate shortage of perinatal pathologists. A survey conducted by Sands in 2022 found that delays in parents receiving post-mortem results have significantly worsened over time. More than a fifth of parents reported waiting up to six months or more for the result of their baby’s post-mortem.
In October 2022, an interim policy for the commissioning of perinatal post-mortems was adopted, which defines inclusion and exclusion criteria as to which cases will be offered a perinatal post-mortem. Since this policy was adopted, no audit of the impact has been undertaken, with NHS England acknowledging that communication of the interim policy has fallen short. Sands has received anecdotal evidence of consent takers being unaware of the new approach and it is concerned that that has led to parents not being fully informed about consent.
There are currently just under 50 full-time equivalent paediatric and perinatal pathology consultants in post in the UK, with an additional 15 vacant consultant posts. The number of current trainees is insufficient to fill these vacancies according to the Royal College of Pathologists. Will the Minister provide a clear commitment and timeline for the recruitment of perinatal pathologists, to ensure that no bereaved parent ever has to wait more than six months for post-mortem results?
It is obvious that staffing remains the single most important issue for maternity services. In a survey commissioned by the Sands and Tommy’s joint policy unit, 84% of midwives who were asked disagreed that there were enough staff around them for them to do their jobs properly. A decrease in staffing levels has been down to staff sickness rates over time and job satisfaction. In 2022, 63% of midwives in England had felt unwell in the past 12 months because of stress.
NHS England has recently published its long-term workforce plan and the Government have provided an initial financial commitment of £2.4 billion over the next five years to fund education and training. Will the Minister consider the importance of long-term recurrent funding, as well as investment in retention? Without that, there is a risk of losing valuable experience and skills in the existing workforce. The workforce plan models the number of future midwives required, but does not include other staff groups, which risks ignoring some of the areas and specialisms in the wider maternity and neonatal workforce, where staffing issues are most acute.
We all know there is no magic money tree, but it is a false economy to continue to deliver services that are potentially unsafe. According to Sands, the cost of harm from clinical negligence caused by NHS maternity services was £8.2 billion in 2021/22—60% of the total cost of harm from clinical negligence in the NHS and more than double what the health service spends on maternity care in the first place. The cost of failure is always so much higher than the cost of success.
In conclusion, while the Government’s commitment to the recommendations of the Ockenden report was welcome, there is a still a long way to go to deliver world- class maternity services and meet the Government’s own target of halving baby loss by 2025. Too often, harm continues to occur as a result of care that is not in line with nationally agreed standards. Listening to the voices and experience of families must be at the heart of policy, but most importantly we must ensure staffing levels are safe, so that no one leaves hospital with empty arms and a broken heart, where that might have been avoided.
Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)
It is a great honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who set out very clearly his work in this space, for which I am very grateful. I extend an offer to him to use the all-party parliamentary group on baby loss for anything that we can do to help bring about the conclusion that he requires, because I believe he is absolutely right.
I am incredibly grateful to my APPG co-chair, the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan), for requesting this debate and to the Backbench Business Committee for allowing it today. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham has already said, it is now a tradition in this place to set aside time to discuss Baby Loss Awareness Week. I have had the privilege of chairing the APPG on baby loss for the last three years, and I also chair the all-party parliamentary group on women's health, which means that much of my time in this place is taken up with supporting women and families through some truly uncomfortable and sometimes deeply unpleasant experiences.
As colleagues may already be aware, Baby Loss Awareness Week was last week, when the House was in recess, but this debate is now marked in the calendar of this place. I know that many right hon. and hon. Friends are in other places today for many good reasons, but there is normally a lot of collaboration across the Benches. We forget party politics and talk about what is important. This debate should be a tradition in this place because it shows Parliament at its best. Not only does it allow the general public to remember that we are all human, but it also means that tribal party politics is put aside, allowing us to try to work together on these important issues.
I want to place on the record my sincere thanks to the APPG for the work that it did before my time in this place under the guidance of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), now the Attorney General, and my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince). Both of them gave powerful testimonies in this place before I arrived. I also thank my former co-chair on the APPG, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), who has such a passion for this topic from his time as Health Secretary. It is through his actions that we are now seeing the NHS workforce plan come to fruition. It was a deeply held passion of his, and it is the key to unlocking a lot of what we talk about in this space.
The APPG, again before my time, established the national bereavement care pathway to improve bereavement care and reduce variabilities throughout the country. It has been adopted by the majority of trusts, but it is a constant challenge to ensure that it is maintained given all the competing priorities facing the NHS. I ask the local health leaders watching the debate today to please understand how important the pathway is. We have had two debates in the Chamber this afternoon on topics that affect so many women and so many families. I ask local health leaders not to put the pathway to one side because it could be a cost-saving exercise in their trust.
I also thank colleagues on both sides of the House who have in the past taken the time to remember the babies that have sadly been lost. I am approached day after day by people who work in this place—some of whom Members would never guess—who have told me privately that this happened to them decades ago and that they still cannot bring themselves to talk about it. We are left to be the advocates for everybody, and if we dug deep, everybody would know somebody who has suffered the loss of a baby or one very close to them.
I am really grateful for the local support in my community. I want to give a big thank you to Mike Spicer and the team at A&P in the port of Falmouth for lighting up their crane in pink and blue last week for Baby Loss Awareness Week. I also thank Nick Simmonds-Screech and the team at Costain who lit up one of the bridges over the A30 in pink and blue during the dualling works. It means a huge amount, and they did it as a favour to me, but all the Cornish families who have lost a baby will have seen those two monuments lit up. It just shows that we are thinking about them.
As I said, Baby Loss Awareness Week was last week, and at the local service in Truro I met the team from the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, including the bereavement midwives. Karen Stoyles, our chief nurse, was sadly absent with covid. I put on record my thanks to Kim O’Keeffe for all her work. We also met parents and families, and marked the occasion with the traditional wave of light, when people across the country who have lost a baby, or people who want to remember those who have lost a baby, light a candle at 7 pm and share the photographs. It means a lot, and that is why I wanted to get all that on the record so that we do not lose momentum in this space.
In my constituency of Truro and Falmouth, we are building a brand-new women and children's hospital. The principle behind the hospital is to deliver a holistic service to families in Cornwall, whether through sexual health or reproductive health advice or care throughout their pregnancy or the aftercare that mothers desperately need. When the hospital is finished in the next couple of years, my constituents will have on their doorstep a facility that specialises in a range of women’s health concerns. I hope it will be a sanctuary for women’s health and a place that really delivers a social benefit, leading to a tangible reduction in baby loss risk throughout the south-west. It will include projects such as e-records, digital wards and, hopefully, electronic bed management. That all sounds very technical, but it frees up clinical staff to be clinical and to be at the bedside caring for patients.
My experience of chairing the two APPGs has confirmed to me that the Government do take baby loss incredibly seriously. We also owe thanks to charities such as Tommy’s, Sands and the Lullaby Trust for all their work in this field. They have incredible teams that do some of the best work, and I will always be grateful for everything they do to help me in this journey. It is also appropriate for me to thank the Minister for her efforts in keeping this at the top of the Department’s priority list, and I appreciate her for addressing the Sands and Tommy’s joint report launch in Portcullis House earlier this year.
It is very easy for our deliberations in this place to concentrate on, and constantly revert to, complaints about staffing levels. Although staffing is vital, it is prudent for us to focus on the core issues of quality practice and the information provided to parents throughout pregnancy. That is why I always go on about the continuity of care. We mentioned in the previous debate how that can help with baby loss in so many ways, and it has been proven to work in hospital trusts in areas where there is a greater chance of social deprivation. As soon as we can get staffing levels up to a safe standard, that continuity of care should be rolled out across the country. It picks up not only on lifestyle issues that could harm a baby, but on things such as domestic violence, which my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham mentioned a moment ago, and so many other issues that can contribute to the preventable loss of a baby, particularly at full term. I cannot stress enough how important that is, and I will keep going on about it until we start to make progress.
I will quickly touch on support for parents after the event and the additional mental health support that we could provide. Mums and dads experiencing the loss of their baby will go through the worst time of their life, and everybody will have their own way of processing the grief. Some people will never get closure on it. As my APPG co-chair the hon. Member for North Shropshire mentioned, at our last meeting we listened to experts in the field of postnatal pathology and highlighted the recruitment and waiting-list issues that have been holding some families back from the closure that they deserve.
In an inquiry that we held a couple of years ago, it struck me that a baby born in Northern Ireland has to be taken to Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool for a post-mortem—I think that is still the case—and it can take months and months before parents get their baby back. Some couples wait nearly a year. I think the same may apply to the Isle of Wight, but do not quote me on that. Certainly, different parts of the country have different set-ups. In Cornwall, our babies go as far as Bristol, and at the moment, the wait time for a post-mortem is weeks rather than months, but, given the stories I hear from around the country, it is a postcode lottery that we need to address urgently.
Helen Morgan
I want to re-emphasise that point because it is so important. When a baby goes for a post-mortem examination, it is in transit and away from its parents. The parents are often unable to keep track of the remains of their baby and when they will get them back. Does the hon. Lady agree that we need to beef up that whole process to give parents the support that they need at such a difficult time?
Cherilyn Mackrory
I agree wholeheartedly. There are a couple of ways in which we can do that. One is the roll-out and expansion to all centres of minimally invasive autopsies and other non-invasive techniques. Not all post-mortems need to be invasive. Certainly, there needs to be an expansion of placental autopsies—if that is the right phrase—because the cause can often be found that way without the need to keep the baby for an awfully long time. We can do a lot more work in that space. The pathologists we have spoken to all want that work to be done, and if they had more time, they would be able to do more research on why it happens. At the moment, a baby could be lost at 38 or 40 weeks for absolutely no reason at all, and the parents will never find out why. Blame can be thrown around for the different things that happened on the day of the birth, but we just do not know the reason, and that is not acceptable in 2023. We will never find out every reason for every lost baby, but we could do an awful lot better.
I am told by Sands, the baby loss charity, that the shortage of perinatal pathologists has been growing over decades, and in recent years, mutual aid between pathology centres has reduced the impact on the national delivery of services, but that approach is breaking down as the capacity of overburdened centres to pick up cases beyond their own areas is dwindling. I cannot see that getting better without direct help in the near future.
We also need to get the basics right. The Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro has the Daisy suite, which is a separate bereavement suite of rooms for those who lose their babies. It has its own bathroom and kitchen—not to put too fine a point on it, but being in labour puts extra pressure on your bowels and bladder, and you can be sick a lot. Being in that space is better not only to face the trauma, but because you do not have to see other parents holding their live babies. That was not available when I was going through the process of losing our baby. There was a girl there by herself—a young mum—who was 38 weeks pregnant when her baby had just stopped moving. Suddenly, I felt very well supported because I had someone there with me. Although we had a room to ourselves, I had to troop and up down the corridor to the bathroom, and I saw healthy babies, pregnant women who were glowing, and families who were just looking forward to taking their babies home. That is just too much to process, so I would be very grateful if we could avoid that. I was surprised to hear this week that the Snowdrop unit at Derriford Hospital has only just opened, but I am so pleased that parents in Plymouth can now make use of it at a time when they will be at their lowest.
This week, a colleague mentioned a constituent of hers who had delivered a stillborn baby and was left on a normal maternity ward—that is unacceptable. The woman was cradling her stillborn baby and people would walk past and congratulate her on the birth because they had no idea that her baby was not alive. She did not know what to say, so she just sort of nodded. Why, oh why, was that poor woman left in that vulnerable state? Most bereavement suites are funded with charitable donations, perhaps with some departmental funding. We need to get the basics right and in place. Although we cannot get everything right quickly, we can easily make things better.
The Royal College of Midwives “State of Maternity Services 2023” report sets out stark staffing shortages in some parts of the country. It acknowledges, however, that the number of people enrolling on maternity courses is up since 2019. Like me, the RCM supports the degree apprenticeship route, and it was fun to see its chief executive talk to a room of midwives who were quite cynical about degree apprenticeships. She was waxing lyrical about how much apprentices loved them, about how much experience they were getting on the ward, and about how they come out of it debt-free and with bags of experience.
What I found interesting is that that is a great way to keep experienced midwives on the ward. At the moment, a lot of them are suffering burnout, which is why staffing levels are leaking most starkly. A midwife in her 50s might have had enough, but if we offer them the chance to come back on the ward for three or four shifts a week to help train up new midwives, through live births and with practical help, they can do that at their own pace, and we would not lose all that experience all at once, so I am a huge advocate of the degree apprenticeship route.
Cornwall has started doing that. As I mentioned in the previous debate, Kim O’Keefe, chief nursing officer at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, told me in the summer that we now have no midwifery vacancies in Cornwall. Not only has every single vacancy been filled but—this is unusual in this country—in Cornwall we have a waiting list of people who want to become midwives. That is testament to the work that the team there has been doing. Notwithstanding the fact that they are currently doing it in a decaying building while they wait with bated breath for our new women and children’s hospital, that all plays into better outcomes for parents and babies in Cornwall in the years to come.
There is so much to do in this space and so much more that I could say. We have not even spoken at length about dads, but a passion of mine is ensuring that dads are looked after during and after the loss of a baby. I do not want to get too personal about it without my husband’s consent, but it was very difficult for him to meet his baby. That is a personal choice. He was never offered any counselling at all. Being a fisherman, he just went out to sea. He has dealt with it in his own way. My advice to any couple watching this debate who has recently lost a baby is: please, please, please rely on other people outside your relationship—rely on family members, rely on your friendship circle—because although you will come back together, you cannot always grieve at the same time and at the same pace. A few moments ago I gave my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham the statistic that 50% of relationships break down. That is because couples want to rely on the person who has always been there for them, but that person is suffering just as much and cannot always be there.
Helen Morgan
I start by thanking the Minister. She has always engaged constructively and proactively with the all-party parliamentary group on baby loss, and I welcome her commitment to the pregnancy loss review and implementing its findings. It is clear that we still have some way to go, and I am sure that this time next year we will be asking for further updates on progress against the Ockenden review, but I thank her for her constructive approach.
On the contributions made by other Members, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) made a good point highlighting not only the impact of baby loss on dads and the need to support them, but the wider issue of helping people who have lost their baby to understand why their baby died, whether that is perinatal pathology or getting a coroner’s inquest into what happened. That is so important, and I thank him for raising that issue.
The hon. Members for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) and for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) shared their personal experiences, which were extremely powerful, and I am extremely grateful to them. They both highlighted important issues, such as the national bereavement care pathway and its roll- out, the importance of continuity of carer and the appropriateness of physical facilities to look after mums and dads who have just lost their baby. Finally, I want to touch on the culture of cover-up, which has come up in every review, and the importance of focusing not just on clinical professionals, but on management culture going forward. In conclusion, I thank everybody who contributed. It has been a useful way to recognise Baby Loss Awareness Week.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered Baby Loss Awareness Week.
Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership
Helen Morgan Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade if she will make a statement on the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership.
The Minister for International Trade (Nigel Huddleston)
The Secretary of State for Business and Trade signed the accession protocol to the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership on Sunday 16 July in Auckland. The UK will be the first new member since CPTPP was created. With the UK as a member, CPTPP will have a combined GDP of £12 trillion and will account for 15% of global GDP. Accession to the agreement sends a powerful signal that the UK is using our post-Brexit freedoms to boost our economy. It will secure our place as the second largest economy in a trade grouping dedicated to free and rules-based trade. It gives us a seat at the table in setting standards for the global economy.
The agreement is a gateway to the wider Indo-Pacific, which is set to account for the majority of global growth and around half of the world’s middle-class consumers in the decades to come. That will bring new opportunities for British businesses abroad and will support jobs at home. More than 99% of current UK goods exports to CPTPP countries will be eligible for zero tariffs. The UK’s world-leading services firms will benefit from modern rules, ensuring non-discriminatory treatment and greater transparency. That will make it easier for them to provide services to consumers in other CPTPP countries.
In an historic first, joining CPTPP will mean that the UK and Malaysia are in a free trade agreement together for the first time. That will give businesses better access to a market worth £330 billion. Manufacturers of key UK exports will be able to make the most of tariff reductions to that thriving market. Tariffs of around 80% on whisky will be eliminated within 10 years, and tariffs of 30% on cars will be eliminated within seven years. Joining CPTPP marks a key step in the development of the UK’s independent trade policy. Our status as an independent trading nation is putting the UK in an enviable position. Membership of that agreement will be a welcome addition to our bilateral free-trade agreements with more than 70 countries. I pay tribute to the many officials and Ministers who have worked on this deal over the past two years, some of whom are in the Chamber today.
Helen Morgan
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting this urgent question.
The Government published a written statement yesterday that the CPTPP had been signed on 16 July. Unfortunately, Members have not had an opportunity to scrutinise the agreement, or to ask the Secretary of State questions about its impact. The CPTPP contains controversial provisions that will potentially undermine British health and safety standards, as well as those in place for the environment and animal welfare. Organisations from trade unions to the RSPCA have expressed their concern. It is apparent that clauses in the arrangement will allow large companies to sue the UK Government behind closed doors if they believe that their profits have suffered from changes to laws or regulations.
Palm oil produced in Malaysia will have tariffs of 12% eliminated, including from areas that have been deforested. There is apparently no mechanism to ensure that imports of palm oil have been sustainably produced. On food standards, the agreement excludes eggs as a sensitive sector, meaning that egg products will be allowed to be imported from countries that are CPTPP members, but where egg production relies heavily on battery caged hens, which were outlawed in Britain in 2012.
For other animal products, sow stalls, the use of antibiotics, hormone treatments and pesticides that are outlawed here will all potentially be imported in greater numbers. Imports that have a lower production cost but a much higher animal welfare and environmental one, risk undermining our world-leading British farmers and food producers.
The Business and Trade Committee, which provides important scrutiny of the process for free trade agreements, produced a report last week that lamented its inability to scrutinise all elements of the trade agreement.
I have the following questions for the Minister. What steps are his Government taking to ensure that the British public can be sure that the food they buy has been produced to the food safety and animal welfare standards that they rightly expect, such as those of the British Lion code of practice? What estimate has he made of the long-term impact on British farming of this agreement, which will bring an increase to GDP of only 0.8% over a decade?
Nigel Huddleston
I am disappointed that the hon. Lady does not see the opportunities for farmers and for this country as a whole from CPTPP. If she shared the confidence in British producers and British services that we have on the Government Benches, she might be able to look at this deal with a glass half full, rather than a glass half empty, but I know that would be a fundamental change of attitude.
The hon. Lady is simply wrong in many areas. It is important that we stop peddling these myths about standards related to CPTPP or any trade deal we are doing. Let us be clear that this deal does not lower any UK product or quality safety requirements. The import standards and import rules that we had the day before we joined CPTPP will be exactly the same the day after. The deal does not alter safety standards, but gives us an opportunity to engage and talk with colleagues and friends around the world on how we would like to improve and work on important issues, such as the environment, which she mentioned, and there is indeed an environment chapter. For example, the UK is committed to tackling illegal deforestation within UK supply chains, and this deal will not change that. As part of concluding CPTPP, the UK and Malaysia have issued a joint statement to reaffirm and strengthen joint work to support sustainable production, particularly of palm oil, in our supply chains.
Local Radio: BBC Proposals
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Sir Mike Penning
My hon. Friend makes an important point to bring me back to Ofcom. If Ofcom is saying, “Nothing to do with me, guv. We don’t have the power to sort this out,” then this House should do that, because we gave Ofcom the powers in the first place. That is crucial.
I will touch on one last thing. It is not all about whether the schools are going to close or the brilliant work that BBC local radio—and, to be fair, some of the commercial stations—did during the covid lockdowns. It is about the little things that matter in our constituencies.
I put my hand up—I am president of Hemel Hempstead Town football club. We are in the Vanarama national league south. If we do really well, we will be in the play-offs, I hope, this year—let’s keep wishing. We used to have two hours of non-league football on Three Counties Radio on a Saturday—gone. Why would that be? Perhaps they think no one is interested, but it was the lifeblood for a lot of the clubs to tell people where they were playing and who were the new players coming in. Football clubs, like pubs and post offices, are the core of our constituencies. Cutting that programming willy-nilly saves what? The BBC cannot even tell us that.
Why does the BBC not say, “Well, we are going to invest more money—£19 million or so—elsewhere”? I am not really interested in that. What I am interested in is why it is taking one amount of money from a certain core activity to put it somewhere else, when it was doing a frankly brilliant job in the first place. By the way, it is the BBC’s duty, under its franchise, to provide that.
Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
The right hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. I want to pick up on his point about what is important to local people. People who live in a rural area like North Shropshire want to know what is happening in North Shropshire. As much as they bear no ill will to the people of Stoke or Wolverhampton, they are not that interested in what is going on there. The lifeblood of every fête, charitable event or local football match is that the organisers can get on local radio and tell people that those events are happening. Does he agree that the local connection is important, particularly for people who live in rural places and cannot access commercial stations, because they do not get a signal? BBC local radio is the lifeblood of those organisations and people.
Sir Mike Penning
The hon. Lady is absolutely correct; BBC local radio is the lifeblood. Whether it is a football match, or the local schools closing because we have had half an inch of snow, those are the sorts of things that are really important to local people. I love Norfolk. I go fishing on the Norfolk broads on a regular basis, but I do not think the Norfolk broads area has any synergy with junction 8 of the M1 being blocked. The latter has massive effects in my constituency, but no effects in another area. I am not really interested in their issues; they are not interested in mine. It breaks up the empathy with the community in what people trust the BBC to do.
As well as our sending a message to Ofcom and to the BBC, the motion before the House today, which was carefully drafted with the assistance of the Table Office, is worded in such a way that, if necessary and if anybody in this House objected to it, we could divide on it, so that this House could send that message to the BBC. I hope that we are unanimous and that we do not need to do that, but if we do, we will. If this House does not divide and we unanimously accept the motion before us, that message needs to be heard by the BBC loudly and clearly. It needs to wake up and smell the coffee before the British public say they have had enough of the BBC.
Oral Answers to Questions
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Maria Caulfield
This is why we have set up the maternity disparities taskforce. We are working with the chief midwife to drive down those disparities, and we are working with NHS England. Maternity is one of those Core20PLUS5 elements, because we recognise that there is huge disparity across the country, which we want to eliminate.
Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Amanda Solloway)
The Department is talking to a range of stakeholders to assess evidence and options for a more targeted approach to consumer protection from April 2024.
Helen Morgan
More than 200,000 disabled households, including people in my constituency, lost out on the £150 warm home discount scheme due to a change in who the Government deem entitled to claim. Disabled people often require additional energy to run specialist equipment and to keep their homes warmer. Given that there is no appeals process, will the Minister agree to review that problem in the system and work with hon. Members to address it next year?
Amanda Solloway
The Government have been committed to supporting disabled people—a whole range of people—in the cost of living crisis. As I have mentioned, we will be meeting and discussing it.
Oral Answers to Questions
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Steve Barclay
My hon. Friend raises an extremely powerful point. It is not only those targets in Wales that are being missed. She will know that people are almost twice as likely to be waiting for treatment in the Labour-run Welsh NHS than they are in England: 21.3% in Wales compared with 12.8% in England. She will also know that the number of two-year waits for operations in Wales, at over 50,000, is considerably higher than that in England, which is below 2,000.
Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
On 30 January, the Secretary of State agreed to meet me and my colleagues who represent the other parts of Shropshire to discuss the particularly acute issues that we have been seeing at our hospitals. That meeting is not in the diary. Will he commit to arranging that as soon as possible, so that we can get these issues addressed?
Steve Barclay
I apologise to the hon. Lady because she raises a perfectly fair point. I will do all I can to expedite that meeting.