Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration Etc.) Bill

Will Quince Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 2nd February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

I thank my friend, the hon. Lady, for giving way. She is making a very brave and powerful speech. I would like to put on the record my huge thanks and appreciation for all her work in the setting up of the all-party group, and for the group’s continuing work. Bereaved parents, all of us, want to ensure that our child’s life, however short, has meaning. The hon. Lady is absolutely doing that and, if she does not mind me saying so, I think Lucy would be very proud of her mummy today.

[Mrs Hodgson]

Thank you very much. I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman was trying to calm me down, but he has probably made me worse! As Members can all see, I feel very strongly about this issue, so I felt that, even though I knew I would end up in floods of tears, I had to come along and take part in this debate and express how strongly I want to support this legislative change, and why.

If Lucy had been born alive at 23 and a half weeks, she would have been incubated immediately and rushed in the waiting ambulance, with flashing blue lights, to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, where they have the regional centre of excellence for special care baby units for very premature babies. She would have had the very best world-class care. She would have had a birth certificate and she would have been celebrating her 20th birthday this year. But sadly she was stillborn, so there were no flashing blue lights, no incubator and no birthday parties, ever. And as I found out to my horror, there was no birth or death certificate. As I held her in my arms and had to come to terms with what had just happened, I also had to come to terms with the fact that, officially, she did not exist, and that I would not be getting any certificate of her arrival or death. She was three to four days short of the required 24-week legal age.

--- Later in debate ---

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for kindly calling me. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter). I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on introducing this important Bill. It is a bit of a smorgasbord of issues that are all important in their own right. It may not come as a surprise to the House that I want to touch on clause 3 on the registration of pregnancy loss occurring before 24 weeks and clause 4 on investigations by coroners into stillbirth.

I have huge amounts of time for the aim of clause 3, and I recognise the huge inequality in the particular case that my hon. Friend raised of the poor mother who lost twins, one born before and one born after the 24 week cut-off date. Only one of them was recognised by the law. That is why the review set out in the Bill is so important.

I am immensely proud to co-chair the all-party group on baby loss, which the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis)—I am pleased to see them both in the Chamber—helped to set up. With my hon. Friend, I remember collaring the former Member for Ipswich, who was then the Care Quality Minister, at about 1.30 am during a Finance Bill. We sat him down and discussed how we were to take our work on baby loss forward, and how we would address some of the big issues.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on his Bill, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince) for his work on baby loss. I lost my son, Ethan, to stillbirth in 2004, and—it might sound strange to say this—I was fortunate to get a stillbirth certificate, because the incident occurred post 24 weeks. I commend my hon. Friend and others for everything they are doing to further this important cause.

[Will Quince]

I am very sorry to hear of my hon. Friend’s loss, and I thank him for his campaigning on this issue. He makes an important point about the discrepancy in our law, and the time has come to address it.

The all-party group on baby loss has two fundamental aims. The first is to reduce stillbirth and neonatal death, and the Government have been hugely supportive on that aim. We now have a target of halving stillbirth and neonatal death by 2025. When I first arrived in Parliament and we raised the issue in late 2015, the aim was to achieve that reduction by 2030, but the date has been brought forward. That is fantastic news, because we lose between nine and 15 babies every day. We have one of the worst records in the western world, and it has to change. The Government have put in place a number of steps to make that happen, and I am hugely positive and optimistic about the future.

Even if we meet the aim of reducing stillbirth and neonatal death by 50%, however, 2,500 to 3,000 babies will be stillborn every year. That does not even touch on the huge number of parents who suffer what we define in law as a miscarriage, and the Bill will give us the opportunity to look at registration and recognition in that area. Even if we achieve all our aims, there will still be parents who go through this emotional and personal tragedy. That is why bereavement care and support are so important. The hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West was right to mention cold cots, because we need such facilities—and, indeed, bereavement suites—in every hospital in the country.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

I have listened to most of this debate, and I have been very impressed by the contributions. Does the hon. Gentleman agree with me about the importance of organisations such as Scunthorpe Rotary, which is working locally to get a bereavement suite at Scunthorpe General Hospital? The work of such organisations across the country makes a real difference to people at a very difficult time in their lives.

[Will Quince]

The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point. Charities and the Government have to work hand in hand with each other and with parents, many of whom want to do something to support the hospital that helped them after they suffered their tragic loss. Parents are helped not just by hospitals, but by charities, too. After our loss in 2014, my wife said to me, “I don’t want flowers. I don’t want the house to be full of flowers that then die.” So we set up a JustGiving page to enable people to donate money—in the end, it was a huge amount—to the specialist bereavement suite.

The work being done by groups such as Rotary, as well as by charities and individuals up and down the country, is to be applauded and welcomed, but the Government should not use it as an excuse not to act in places that do not have such facilities. The Secretary of State has been very positive in that regard, and he wants there to be a bereavement suite attached to every maternity unit in the country.

Bereavement care is hugely important, and I am pleased to say that the bereavement care pathway has been launched and is operating in 11 trusts. The plan is to roll it out nationwide later this year, to provide consistent bereavement care for those who suffer the loss of a child. Not only are the consequences of getting it wrong too great for the parents and the family, but there is a huge social cost, as we can see from the number of parents who, sadly, separate after the loss of a baby.

I want to touch on the point about recognition. The hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West made this case very powerfully in her speech, and I applaud her for her bravery in setting out the case for this change more powerfully than I ever could. We come to the very term “stillborn.” In effect, when we talk about stillbirth we are talking about a “still born” baby. It is important to recognise the double meaning: they are indeed still born, whether it is pre-24 weeks or post-24 weeks. For the parents who hold that baby in their arms—perfectly formed, beautiful babies—the only difference is that they are not breathing. I am not going to be the person who says to that parent, “That baby didn’t live,” or, “They weren’t here. They weren’t with us. They weren’t a real entity. They shouldn’t be recognised in the law.” The time has absolutely come for this change. We pretty much have cross-party consensus on that, and I am really pleased that the Government support it. The review will make a difference and the all-party group on baby loss will, of course, feed into that.

Clause 4 is a policy that I very much support. My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham and I are undoubtedly very much on the same page on investigations into stillbirth, and his campaign is a very big part of why the Government have made so much progress on this issue. We can learn a huge amount more from people’s experiences and share them across the NHS, and that has to be a good thing, because the more we speak to parents, the more we hear that those who lose a child want their child’s life, however short, to have meaning. I raised that in an intervention on the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West, but I am not sure it helped all that much. What I mean by that is that parents want to know what happened, how it happened, where there will be learning, and that those learnings will be shared across our NHS to ensure that as few parents as possible have to go through that huge emotional tragedy and ordeal.

I was kindly invited by the Secretary of State for Health—now the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care—to his speech to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. He came immediately afterwards to make a statement, saying that from April this year, the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch will investigate every case of stillbirth, neonatal death, suspected brain injury or maternal death notified to the RCOG Each Baby Counts programme. To put that into numbers, there are around 1,000 incidents every year. He also announced—this point is significant in relation to the Bill—that he would work with the Ministry of Justice

“to look closely into enabling, for the first time, full-term stillbirths to be covered by coronial law”—[Official Report, 28 November 2017; Vol. 632, c. 179.]

This seems an appropriate time for me to pay tribute to the Secretary of State for all the support that he has given me and the all-party group in our campaign to reduce the stillbirth and neonatal death rate. I also pay tribute—this is my first opportunity to do so in the Chamber since the reshuffle—to my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr Dunne) for all his work as Minster of State in the Department of Health, following on from his predecessor, the Care Quality Minister, the former Member for Ipswich. As Back-Bench MPs, we have numerous meetings with Ministers, and we know that those take place more out of courtesy than anything else, but that was never the case with my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow. He genuinely took an interest in the issue and our work, and he recognised that we had a real opportunity to make a huge difference in reducing our stillbirth and neonatal death rates in this country. We should all be very proud of that legacy.

My wider point is that the Government are listening. The Bill reinforces the mood music and soundings that we have had from them in this regard. They are trying to learn from best practice elsewhere and from unfortunate incidents where stillbirth occurs. Most importantly, as I mentioned, the Secretary of State has already told the House that he is looking into coroners investigating stillbirths, and that is very welcome. When that work has been undertaken, we will certainly work with him and anybody else who wants to be involved with the all-party group.

Improving support for bereaved parents and learning from experiences so that we can lower our stillbirth and neonatal death rate are small things, but they will make a huge difference to thousands of people up and down the country. I will support the Bill.