Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to the report by the Prison and Probation Ombudsman entitled Investigation into baby death at HMP Bronzefield HMP identifies key failings, published on 22 September 2021, what steps his Department plans to take in response to the finding that every pregnancy in prison is high risk.

The death of ‘Baby A’ was a tragedy and we have taken a range of actions to prevent this from happening again in partnership with Health.

On 20 September the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) published a new policy on pregnancy, Mother and Baby Units and maternal separation from children up to the age of two in women’s prisons, which contains a range of reforms for improving the care of pregnant women, including reforms that address the learning from Baby A.

As part of our reforms, we have increased central data collection on self-declared pregnancies in women’s prisons. We will be publishing annual snapshots in the HMPPS Annual Digest. The first publication on 29 July, which covers the period July 2020 - April 2021, showed that on average there were 26 women in prison self-declared as pregnant each week. At present, there is no central collection that breaks this data down into those sentenced and those held on remand, however this is collected locally by individual prisons to ensure care is appropriate.

Women in prison should have access to the same range and quality of healthcare services compared to that which they would find in the community, including midwifery, obstetric and health visiting services. For information on the commissioning of clinical services for pregnant women in prison please refer to NHS England and NHS Improvement, the responsible authority.