National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation

Jen Craft Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[James Murray]

I thank the hon. Lady for sharing her experience and raising the importance of this issue for the benefit of maternity services more widely. I am very happy for myself or one of the ministerial team to meet her to discuss this in detail, because it is very important that that is part of the national action plan and our wider response.

[Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)]

I very much welcome the report and Baroness Amos’s work to highlight the failings across our maternity system. It is pure and utter medical misogyny that has led us here. The value that we place on the lives and experiences of women has been brought to the fore, and it is very, very low. The throughline of this report and the ones before it is that women’s voices were not heard, their pain was not believed, and their experiences were completely and utterly disregarded. That must change.

I would like to add my voice to the calls for measures to address the disparity in treatment for black and ethnic minority women. There must be proper training and continuing professional development to ensure that black women do not have the experiences that we have seen to date. I also plead with the Secretary of State to ensure that any proposals contain real accountability measures. I have a maternity unit in my constituency that is inadequate and has always been rated inadequate or “requires improvement”, but I have never seen a senior member of staff ever hauled over the coals. That cannot be right and it has to change.

[James Murray]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to call this what it is in many cases, which is misogyny in maternity services, and to draw attention to the different impact on different mothers and the racial and ethnic inequality within the system. The anti-discrimination programme that I mentioned, which is being rolled out over the next year and a half, will be an important first step, but it cannot be the sum total of what we do to address discrimination and inequality. That will be a focus of the national taskforce, as will—to repeat a point many Members have rightly made—accountability, because it is only by embedding accountability throughout the system that we can be truly confident of change.