Historical Stillbirth Burials and Cremations

John Hayes Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Proust said:

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

My eyes were opened to the subject by the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), since when we have worked together to bring about the children’s funeral fund—under her leadership, by the way; I was merely her acolyte. In doing that work, I became interested not just in that subject but in the whole matter of how people are dealt with when they die and how their loved ones are treated. There is much to be said on that, but time does not permit us to say it all today, for this particular debate is of course about stillbirth and lost children.

The Minister rightly said that things have improved. Some of this issue relates to the past—what happened to those who were loved and lost in years gone by—but I implore the Minister to reflect on whether it is possible for us to do more with local authorities, which are responsible for these matters, because, as she said, cemeteries maintain records, and cemeteries lie within the purview of local government. Perhaps further work can be done to impress on local authorities the need to make information available. Furthermore, in respect of people who are stillborn now, perhaps we could be certain that all health authorities are doing their best. I agree that things have improved, but we need to make sure that that improvement is consistent throughout the country.

In respect of the support given to those who have lost, as a number of Members have said, we need to ensure that the counselling, which makes so much difference, is readily available, quickly, and to whole families. Much is made of maternal love, and rightly so, but too little is made of paternal love. It is sometimes underestimated and often under-celebrated. The love of fathers and grandparents needs to be taken into account, too. Support for whole families when these events occur is critical.

[Tim Loughton]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point about fathers. We talk a lot about the perinatal mental illness suffered by at least one in six women—and much more is being done about that—but it is less known that many fathers, particularly new fathers, suffer from perinatal mental illness as well. The impact of losing a newborn is of importance not just for the mother but equally for the father. We forget that at our peril.

[Sir John Hayes]

My hon. Friend, who served with me in the Department for Education, where he was responsible for matters concerning children, has a long track record of defending the interests of families and fathers. I pay tribute to that and entirely endorse what he has just said. Grandparents also feel these things very deeply. My children are only 19 and 15, so I am not enjoying grandparenthood yet, but those Members who are will know quite how profound their involvement is and their distress at loss can be. I entirely agree with what has been said about counselling, support and mental health.

I hope you will forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker, for saying a word about public health funerals, a parallel but closely related matter on which the hon. Member for Swansea East and I have also co-operated. Councils in the UK spend about £4 million a year on nearly 15,000 burials or cremations for those with no next of kin or whose families are unable or unwilling to pay. They are known as public health funerals, although rather chillingly they are sometimes described as paupers’ funerals, which sounds so Dickensian, does it not? None the less, public health funerals are held for about 3% of all deaths, and there are real concerns about poor practice. The number of public health funerals has increased dramatically since 1997.

Tragically—in some cases councils are providing the bare minimum provision. Some of these funerals are held behind closed doors and families are prohibited from attending. There are instances of councils refusing to return ashes to families, even when requested. Sometimes, loved ones are not told when the funeral is going to take place, so they do not even know whether their loved one has been buried or, in most cases, cremated. I take this opportunity, with your permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, to call again on the Government to communicate with local authorities about the strict need to ensure that these funerals are dealt with in a decent, civilised and humane way. I am not confident that that is happening across the whole country, and it needs to do so without further delay.

I know that other Members want to contribute, so I shall draw my remarks to a conclusion simply by saying this. I spoke earlier of the Dickensian character of paupers’ funerals. Dickens said:

“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.”

Love is greater than life because love lasts longer and, because it does it should be at the heart of policy makers’ considerations when they deal with the highly important, very sensitive and profound issues that we debate today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I had not intended to speak in this debate, but, as is usual with subjects brought here by the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), it is difficult to resist; they are always such important and emotive issues, and the contributions we have heard have only heightened that fact. I also pay tribute to the sensitivity and real-world personal knowledge that the Minister has brought to this debate, and indeed to everything to do with children and babies generally. It greatly heightens the worth of what we do here.

Stillbirth, a hugely underappreciated subject, has been disproportionately debated in the Chamber in recent years, thanks to the brave personal testimonies of many right hon. and hon. Members whose families have been affected by baby loss in such tragic ways. Their contributions have been hugely valuable and moving, but, more importantly, have led to changes in legislation and greatly raised the profile of this important issue. It is an example of some of the great but underappreciated things we do in the House, and this is another great opportunity for us to do good on a really important issue.

My right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) was right to mention the connection with mental illness, particularly around extended family members. Too often we look at mothers in isolation, with all the problems of pregnancy and childbirth, whether it is a healthy child or a stillborn child. We need to do more, as a society and as a Government, to think of the family in the round and the implications and impact that the tragedy of stillbirth can have on others, besides the mother.

We have made great progress in legislation in recent years, but, more importantly, we have made much progress in the sensitivity with which hospitals treat bereaved parents. We have legislated for bereavement leave, for example, but we should now consider extending that to this area as well. We have maternity and paternity leave, but losing a baby is hugely traumatic and impacts on the ability of parents to work normally afterwards.

I recently visited again the new bereavement suite in Worthing Hospital, which is officially the best hospital in the country with what is officially the best maternity department in the country. The bereavement suite is a fantastic facility. It is hard to imagine that until a few years ago mothers who had sadly just given birth to a stillborn child, or a child who died soon after, would be left within hearing range of children who had fortunately been born healthy to a mother in the same ward. Greater sensitivity is now shown throughout the whole NHS. It was great to visit that example of how well we now look after parents who tragically cannot take their child home with them.

It was through Worthing Hospital’s maternity department and the experience of my constituent Hayley from Worthing that I became much more familiar with the issue of stillbirth. She came to me to say that she had given birth to a stillborn child at about 19 and a half weeks at Worthing Hospital. She had been there in labour throughout the weekend and had gone through all the pains and anguish of giving birth to a stillborn child. That led to my Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration etc) Act 2019 and a debate about the whole issue of how we look at and recognise the existence of children stillborn before the 24-week threshold.

Hayley’s experience goes back to the extraordinary revelations we have heard already about how we used to deal with stillborn babies and how the parents had no involvement. Once a woman was delivered of a stillborn baby, any authority or interest the parents had in that child apparently came to an end. It was an extraordinarily brutal and inhumane approach. In the case of Hayley, she and her partner held the child, named the child, had a formal funeral for the child and now know where the child is buried and can mourn. That has been part of the grieving process for them. It is right that the parents be able to do that, if it is their wish; they got the footprint and the photographs, and that was right for them.

The tragedy still is, however, that that child never existed in the eyes of the state, because he happened to have been born before the 24-week threshold, and that is what the 2019 Act aims to address. I wish to make a plea to the Minister. Section 3 obliges the Department of Health and Social Care to conduct a review into how we can do something about pre-24-week stillbirths—they are not technically called “stillbirths”. To give him his due, the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), set up the review before the Act became law—I sat on and contributed to it, along with the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson)—but it has not met since 2018 and no subsequent review has been forthcoming. We still need to sort this out, because too many babies are being born just before 24 weeks. In previous debates, I have given examples of children born at 23 weeks, six days and a few hours. In one case, twins were born either side of the 24-week threshold. One was recognised and registered and one was not. This is an anomaly and an inhumanity and it is so important that we deal with it. I urge the Minister to inquire into where we are with the review.

We talk a lot in the House about historical injustices—this debate is technically about historical injustices, although we have spoken more about the present. I think of the historical child sex abuse scandal, the inquiry into which will go on for many years, but there are also parallels with the forced adoptions that occurred many years ago, when women, in an era of different morals, were forced to give up babies born out of wedlock. Many of those children ended up in Australia. There have been many reviews into how that was allowed to happen and into helping those children to re-establish connection with their birth parents.

What downside can there be to giving every assistance, difficult though it may be, to parents who, after having a stillborn child, were given no role in what happened to the body and have no knowledge of where the child’s remains are? I acknowledge that, as the Minister said, it would be difficult, particularly going back several decades, but we must make sure that hospitals, crematoriums and other public agencies do everything they can to respond sympathetically and extensively to queries from those people, just as we have done with child sex abuse and historical forced adoption.

The point I raised with the Minister might meet with some reluctance in some hospitals where practices were not of a quality we might have expected. Another section in my Act empowers coroners for the first time to investigate stillbirths. At the moment, they cannot do that, because a child who is stillborn is deemed never to have lived, and coroners can only investigate the deaths of humans who have lived. In a minority of cases—this practice was not extensive—children born alive have been designated as stillborn to avoid investigation through the coronial system. There is no reason why, once the further regulations are passed—I hope they will be soon; the Minister is right that the consultation ended last June—that we should not get on with giving coroners the power to investigate where they have reason to suspect that a stillbirth is not as simple or straightforward as it appears and that there might have been some medical negligence, oversight or whatever. If there were clusters of unexplained stillbirths, people might be reluctant to be co-operative in tracking down the details of what happened to that child and afterwards. I would hope, in the interests of providing parents who have already suffered a loss with some degree of closure, at least on what happened to the body of that child, that everyone involved in the national health service and other public agencies would want to be as co-operative as possible.

[Sir John Hayes]

I asked the Minister to consider new guidance for local authorities about both past and present practice, and perhaps my hon. Friend might echo that call by suggesting that the Government should make direct and urgent contact with health authorities, for exactly the reasons he has described, with the same kind of vehemence.

[Tim Loughton]

That is really the point that I was looking to make, but my right hon. Friend has done it much more clearly.

If it had not been her intention already, perhaps a takeaway from this debate for the Minister might be to send a communication around maternity departments, and indeed local authorities responsible for crematoriums and others, to express the hope that they would co-operate and to set out the exact extent of the potential issue that we are dealing with.