Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of trends in the level of (a) infant mortality and (b) premature births.

Data show that there were 2,503 infant deaths in England in 2017 (the last year for which official statistics have been published) and 646,794 live births. The infant mortality rate has been reducing since the 1920s. The rate was 4.2 in 2010 and reached an all-time low of 3.6 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2014. Since then the rate has increased each year between 2014 to 2017, by which it has reached 3.9 deaths per 1,000 live births. The pre-term birth rate has remained at around 8% of all births since 2013.

The Maternity Safety Strategy and NHS Long Term Plan sets out a range of initiatives that focus on reducing pre-term births and plans to redesign and expand neonatal critical care services to improve the safety and effectiveness of services and experience of families. These initiatives are aimed at meeting the National Maternity Safety Ambition to halve the 2010 rates of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths and brain injuries occurring during or soon after birth by 2025 and to reduce the pre-term birth rate from 8% to 6%.