Maternity Commissioner

Olly Glover Excerpts

Monday 20th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Alec. I thank the hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for introducing this important and sensitive debate with his customary eloquence.

I thank the 464 of my constituents who signed the e-petition, placing my constituency in the top 25 nationally for signatories. I also want to thank the many constituents who have been in touch with me and my team—many of whom I have met at constituency surgeries—about their maternity experiences.

This debate is important because of the familial and societal importance of safe, reassuring and comfortable pregnancy and childbirth, and all the anxiety and exhilaration that comes with that. I know that not from my own experience, but from that of friends and constituents. I have never seen people cry so much or so intensely as at the funeral of my friend Steve and Yue’s daughter. They, along with my friend Joel, who also lost a baby, have been superbly supported by Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal charity. They have all now experience successful births.

I want to emphasise what this debate should be about. It is definitely not about criticising hard-working and dedicated individual midwives and health workers, who so often do an amazing job in very challenging circumstances. It is about improving the top-level leadership, culture, staffing levels and processes that affect maternity units.

In my constituency, we have local maternity units in community hospitals in Wantage and Wallingford. These are welcomed by many constituents who would otherwise have to make what is often a long journey to Oxford. Otherwise, births happen in the maternity unit at Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital. I visited the department in September 2025 and was given a comprehensive tour, including the new bereavement ward. I thank all the staff I met, who were committed to improving the care there. The department-level leadership was receptive to feedback and acknowledged that care at the John Radcliffe hospital has at times gone wrong. That is important, given the many constituents who have contacted me about their experiences at the John Radcliffe hospital.

I have met a number of constituents who have been affected by the traumatic and deeply tragic circumstances of stillbirth, complicated births that have resulted in lifelong and serious disabilities for children, post-traumatic stress disorder for mothers or a lack of support. I will tell some of those constituents’ stories; I am grateful for their consent that I do so.

I met Julie Ray at a constituency surgery some months ago. Her granddaughter Harper Rose was stillborn at the John Radcliffe hospital in May 2023. Julie believes that her death could have been avoided. The mother had a high body mass index. Although it was highlighted early on in her pregnancy, the midwife-led care she received did not always appreciate the potential for serious complications at birth. She was supposed to receive consultant-led care, but that did not happen and important decisions were left to midwives.

Despite the plethora of maternity guidelines provided by bodies such as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the website perinatal.org.uk, Julie was surprised that there were no more specific and binding rules that hospitals had to follow. Julie wants to see a maternity system in place, designed to prevent avoidable death and injury. She also wants coroners’ offices to be used for the post mortems of babies. Harper’s post mortem was carried out by the John Radcliffe hospital’s own pathology laboratory, which creates concerns about a lack of independence and the potential for unconscious bias.

My constituent Anna lost her granddaughter Wyllow-Raine. Anna has met the noble Baroness Amos more than once and is actively engaged in the Amos review, for which all my constituents have expressed their gratitude. They have high expectations of the review. Anna’s daughter, the mother of Wyllow-Raine, wants to see real accountability being taken for mistakes. She believes that a blood sugar test should have been done on her baby, as per NICE guidelines, and if it had been, Wyllow-Raine would still be here. They question the value of guidelines if hospitals are not following them. Anna would like to see a national inquiry into the Oxford university hospitals trust and the John Radcliffe hospital specifically.

My constituent Joanna was left to give birth without a midwife or pain relief, so the safe arrival of her children was essentially down to luck rather than to proper maternity care. She has raised concerns around issues of consent, as well as long waiting times after requesting her notes from the hospital.

A constituent who wishes to remain anonymous had birth complications during the delivery of her son in 2019 that left him with extremely severe lifelong disabilities. He requires round-the-clock care and cannot meet any of his own needs. Engagement from the Oxford university hospitals trust has been lacking to date.

Finally, Natasha and her partner tragically lost their first-born son, Arlo Huxley Harewood. After experiencing a tremendously difficult pregnancy, she was left alone in a room with the news of her loss. She felt that she was “fearmongered” when she was informed that if things turned, she would need to go for an emergency C-section under general anaesthetic with a tube down her throat:

“I was being prodded and poked for blood samples, a catheter fitted, induced vaginally, given a blood transfusion, asked to sign away and deliver my passed baby boy, thankfully naturally.”

Aggravatingly, a few days after the birth of her stillborn child, there was mention of HELLP syndrome when she was in the bereavement ward. She has been left with feelings of self-blame, which no grieving mother should ever have to go through.

As we have heard, the petition is part of a wider campaign led by the former Conservative MP for Stafford East, Theo Clarke, and by reality TV star Louise Thompson. I join my constituents in thanking them for their work. This year, they launched this petition to appoint a maternity commissioner to improve maternity care for mums and babies. A 2024 inquiry, led by the birth trauma all-party parliamentary group and by Theo Clarke, recommended that a maternity commissioner be appointed alongside a national maternity strategy to ensure mums and babies are safe and looked after with professionalism and compassion. A maternity commissioner would oversee and introduce past recommendations. Advocates have emphasised that a maternity commissioner is necessary to restore public confidence in NHS maternity services and ensure accountability.

On average, a woman gives birth every 56 seconds in the UK, yet one in three women describe their childbirth experience as traumatic. Sadly, post-traumatic stress disorder affects one in 20 mothers after giving birth. The rate of women dying during or soon after pregnancy in the UK has increased by 20% over the past decade, a trend that I am sure we are all concerned about. A 2024 Care Quality Commission report based on an inspection of 131 maternity units found that 65% of them were not safe for women to give birth in. It also found that 47% of trusts require improvement in safety and a further 18% were rated inadequate. It stated that

“we are concerned about the potential normalising of serious harm in maternity.”

I am pleased that the Liberal Democrats have launched a maternity rescue package to make Britain the safest country in the world to have a baby, with high-quality care wherever we live. Our package has much in common with what the petitioners are calling for, and we hope that they will be encouraged that many of us in Westminster are listening.

A national maternity commissioner would oversee improved standards of care nationally, and a director of midwifery would be appointed in every maternity service alongside an extra 300 consultant midwives to drive clinical excellence. It would also see specialist doctors present on every maternity unit 24/7 and provide one-to-one midwifery care to every woman during labour. That would ensure that it is no more dangerous to give birth at night or at the weekend than at any other time. Previous research found that 73% of maternity units in England do not have a consultant present at night, despite most births taking place outside working hours. Many negligence claims for poor maternity care are linked to failings in care outside regular working hours.

Too many families have been affected by birth trauma, and reform is desperately needed. Since 2015, there have been many national reviews into the safety of maternity services, as well as high-profile investigations into care at individual maternity trusts, with calls for a national inquiry into maternity care. That is why I welcome Baroness Amos’s review, which will be valuable as a centralising piece of work, but it is the latest in a string of national and local reviews or inquiries, which together have produced over 700 recommendations. I hope the Minister will enlighten us as to why this latest review will be different.

The reviews show so many similar themes: failure to listen to women, lack of time for training and strengthening teamwork between staff, inadequate staffing and high levels of burnout, lack of proper assessment, poor management of risk, unsuitable estates and failure to learn when things go wrong. After so many reviews, it is clear that we need improved standards of care nationally.

The recommendation for a maternity commissioner is widely supported across the parties. My constituents want to see a clear timeline for the appointment of a commissioner, if that is something the Government decide to support, so that learning and change happen this time.