Baby Loss

Lizzi Collinge Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lizzi Collinge (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Lab)]

I speak with a number of hats on: as the MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, representing all my constituents who have lost babies in pregnancy; as a mum of two children; and as a woman who has lost two much-wanted pregnancies. I want to use my place here to shine a light on the pain that families are feeling due to baby loss, and the steps that the Government can take and are taking to help them, from enforcing a duty of candour on public bodies to giving bereavement leave to parents who have lost a baby before 24 weeks of pregnancy.

First, I welcome the national maternity investigation. I thank the Secretary of State for his attention to it, and for listening to harmed families. I want to emphasise that, on the whole, maternity care in this country is safe, but where it is not, strong action must be taken. I was relieved to see that my local trust, Morecambe Bay, will be part of the national investigation, not least because of the experiences of my constituents Ryan and Sarah, whose baby Ida was born in 2019 and died seven days after. Ida died because of failings in her care. I know, as Ryan and Sarah do, that mistakes happen—healthcare workers are human—but they have had to fight every step of the way to get the truth about their daughter’s death, which feels so inhumane. After the hospital trust’s completely inadequate internal investigation declared there to be no care issues and Ida’s death was graded as “moderate harm”, Ryan and Sarah had to approach a senior coroner to get a full inquest. It was only at that inquest, five and a half years later, that the trust accepted that its failings had led to Ida’s death.

The thing that breaks my heart is that those failings had already been identified: the Kirkup report identified major failings, which were meant to have been fixed. I first became involved in maternity advocacy in Morecambe Bay after the pretty awful birth of my first child. There was a lot of activity in the trust in response to the Kirkup findings, and I do believe that improvements were made, but two things never went away, and I think they are still harming families to this day.

The first thing that I want to highlight is the ideological belief that certain types of birth are superior to others. We hear talk of “normal” or “physiological” birth. The belief that that is somehow superior to a birth with intervention still harms people today. The second thing is the organisational culture that led to a care organisation responding to a baby’s death not with care, respect and humility, but with a gross failure to investigate, a gross failure to act with decency and kindness, and a gross lack of transparency.

Finally, I want to mention a constituent who came to my surgery a few weeks ago. Her stepdaughter was born sleeping many years ago, and she and her husband recently found out that she was buried in a mass public grave. They know the location where she was put to rest, and they really want to put a marker directly on the grave site, but apparently that is not allowed under local council rules. They are puzzled, as am I, as to why marking one baby’s death is somehow disrespectful to the other babies who lie in that mass public grave. I am working with my constituent to try to address that.

I am glad that the pain that families feel across our country is being recognised in this place today. We cannot let more babies die preventable deaths. We cannot let those losses go unacknowledged. I thank Members in the Chamber today for their work.