Baby Loss Awareness Week

Saqib Bhatti Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Andy MacNae]

I will come on to the full package of support that is needed, but what the hon. Member raises is indicative of how care is not available when people need it most—we hear that time and again.

[Saqib Bhatti (Meriden and Solihull East) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is incredibly generous in giving way and is making an excellent speech. When there is a gap with therapeutic care, there are charities, such as the Lily Mae Foundation in my constituency, that fill it. We have also talked about Sands and Tommy’s—there are lots of charities out there that need support as they do that important work. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we should consider more support for them as well?

[Andy MacNae]

Supporting charities is vital; they do so much incredible and brilliant work, and I would encourage any support that could be given. I will now attempt wrapping up and not take any more interventions —my eye has been caught by Madam Deputy Speaker.

The care received after losing a baby stays with a family forever. Kindness, dignity and privacy cannot remove grief, but poor and absent care after loss will deepen trauma and cause long-term harm. To be clear, good bereavement support must include fathers. Only 29% of services offered basic assessments to fathers in 2024—that is simply not good enough. Services must recognise that fathers and partners will also grieve.

We need to do better, and we can. We know what needs to be done. The national bereavement care pathway already exists and covers miscarriage, termination of pregnancy for foetal anomaly, stillbirth, neonatal death and sudden unexpected death in infancy. Every NHS trust in England has voluntarily adopted it, but implementation remains inconsistent because services have not always received the resources or prioritisation needed to deliver it. We must address that and require that all bereavement pathways are considered within NHS planning and resourcing.

Effective bereavement support should be integral to all maternity services, with identified bereavement leads. All staff who may care for bereaved families should have access to appropriate bereavement training during working hours, and they must themselves receive the support they need in dealing with the losses they have seen. When loss has occurred, every family should have a private space to spend time with their baby, make memories and begin to process what has happened. Specialist bereavement support services should be there to support them through personalised support plans, and in the longer term they need to have specialist mental health support available to respond as trauma manifests, even if that is years later.

The question is no longer whether maternity and neonatal services require fundamental change—report after report has answered that. The question is whether we have the determination to deliver it. We need targets to reduce baby deaths and eliminate inequalities by 2035, supported by good data to show that policy is working. We need a commissioner with the independence and authority to hold the system to account. We need care that sees and listens to every family as individuals. We need to give staff the training, time, capacity and protection they need to provide safe care and to speak up when something is wrong. And when a baby dies, we need compassionate, high-quality bereavement care for every family.

Last year, I said that we had the opportunity and obligation to act. That obligation is now greater, because the actions we must take have been laid before us. Families have heard promises before, they have watched recommendations accepted, and they have been assured that lessons would be learned, only to see another family experience the same failures. We owe them something different now, not another expression of good intent, but evidence that care is changing and lives are being saved.

Bereaved families have given us their testimony, time and trust. They should not be asked to return in another year—or in another decade—to tell us that the same failures continue. We cannot bring back the babies who have died, but we can honour their short lives through what we do next.

--- Later in debate ---

[Saqib Bhatti (Meriden and Solihull East) (Con)]

I start by paying tribute to all the excellent speakers who have shared their story with the utmost bravery. This debate is one I have attended since I was first elected, and it is the only debate I know during which the Doorkeepers, quite rightly, distribute tissues. I am the vice-chair of the APPG on baby loss, and I pay tribute to everyone who has contributed to this debate and to the inquiry that the APPG has carried out.

I will start with a slightly more positive story, which is a personal one, but while the outcome is positive, this is relevant to some of the experiences we have heard about. We have just welcomed our third baby—he is about seven months old—and we had the good fortune to attend the midwifery unit at Warwick hospital. It is not in my constituency, but I would still encourage the Secretary of State to go to visit it, which I am sure the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) would welcome.

We had a very positive experience in the sense that the midwives were really good in their communication. I am going to protect my baby’s identity, but he has crazy hair, so I am going to call him baby Elvis. However, when baby Elvis came out, he was not breathing. I remember the moment, because the midwife had pressed the panic alarm and he came out and he was grey. I suppose I am speaking about it today because my wife has been trying to get me to talk about it for about seven months and I haven’t. And now I will do it in front of the TV cameras; she is a very patient woman.

What I remember in those moments—my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns) talked about CPR—was that the midwife just went straight into action. I did not realise that the room had filled up with health professionals from across the hospital. It was quite a sight to see when I turned around, once everything had settled down. In the moment I thought, “Oh my god, we’re about to become another statistic,” but the midwives worked their magic.

The support needed by non-birthing partners has come up in the debate. I do not want to take away anything from mothers and what they go through—clearly, they go through everything, as we have heard—but there is a call that whatever support is provided takes into account partners and parents too. I admit that I have thought about that moment many, many times in the past seven months and I still do—those images do not leave you—so I hope that, in anything the Secretary of State can do and will do, they are taken into account.

In the limited time I have, I am going to make a few calls and recognise some of the charities I have worked with in my locality. There is work on a national framework to ensure that standards are put in place. Of course, any standards that are put in place will need key performance indicators and accountability along with them. I am sure the Secretary of State is looking at that and I welcome her being in her place today.

Many parents go through the NCT—National Childbirth Trust—training, but we went through a private provider called Bump to Baby. One key thing that came up was the training to be able to challenge what was given to us—my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Stamford spoke about this—and to have the confidence to be able to say no or to ask why. That really helped us as a family to talk about our baby. The midwives, recognising that there were questions that needed to be answered, spent a lot of time answering questions afterwards—they really went over and above. The training during pregnancy is really important because it gives parents the power in their arsenal to be able to ask those questions.

The point about data and miscarriages has been made. It has also been made to me by my constituents, so I hope the Secretary of State can clarify what thought process she is going through around collecting data on miscarriages.

In my intervention earlier on the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Andy MacNae), I mentioned the Lily Mae Foundation. I met Amy and Ryan, who set up the foundation over a decade ago and who have recently received the British Empire Medal. It is a smallish charity that punches way above its weight and they are incredibly strong in what they do. They have given therapy to over 1,000 parents grieving baby loss. They have supported professionals by giving them training, too. They pointed out the postcode lottery that does occur. Smaller charities do not always get the support and they are being asked to do more with less, so that is an important point that I wanted to stress. They see first-hand that increased load.

I want to pay tribute to a couple of friends of mine. Baby loss can touch anybody and they have gone through it in the past couple of months. They experienced it at Musgrove Park hospital. They were really keen for me to stress how great the labour team were, but they did see grieving bereaved parents next to families who were celebrating a birth. Clearly, that disparity still continues and it is one I have seen in other hospitals, too. Perhaps the Secretary of State could reflect on that, pay tribute to the staff of Musgrove Park and recognise baby Merlin, who they sadly lost.

Finally, on Thursday at St Philip’s church in Dorridge, many of my constituents will be gathering for the “Wave of Light” service and the windmill dedication set up by the TeddyRose Foundation.