Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to recover the capacity of (a) antenatal care, (b) maternity units and (c) post-natal care in the NHS to pre-covid-19 outbreak levels.

Throughout the pandemic, NHS England and NHS Improvement have been guiding maternity services to prioritise maintaining safe and personalised maternity care by making adjustments to service provision only where necessitated by the local impact of COVID-19. Wherever possible, services have been asked to reinstate a fully personalised approach to meeting the needs of individual women and their families and the level of care contacts and choice options available to women and their partners across the maternity pathway.

Some changes have been made to the way that women receive their antenatal and postnatal care, however, women are still being offered their required number of appointments as per guidelines set by the Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.