Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent discussions he has had with NHS England on regional variations in standards of maternity care.

The Department continues to work in partnership with NHS England to improve standards of maternity care. We are clear that systems and trusts need to identify when maternity services are at risk of providing unsafe care so that action can be taken. NHS England has recently established a Reading the Signals Data Co-ordination Group who will bring together data projects to identify and support trusts who may be vulnerable to bad outcomes.

The Maternity and Neonatal Outcomes Group, also formed by NHS England, is progressing work towards identifying outcome measures which will help identify trends and variation amongst regions nationally.