Contribution
I congratulate the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) on coming first in the private Member’s Bill ballot and on promoting this Bill. In the previous Session, my private Member’s Bill was the first to pass through this place and the other place, so I wish the right hon. Gentleman similar success with his very important Bill. Having taken through a private Member’s Bill, I know full well the hard work that he and his team will be putting into the proposals, and I want to put on record my thanks to them for doing so.
I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Floor of the House about the importance of a baby’s first 1,000 days of life. We all know of the love, care and attention that new-born babies need to thrive. By the time they reach 1,001 days old, they will already have progressed to having some form of independence in eating and communicating. The devastating fact, however, is that in the same timeframe, the impact of financial and health inequalities will already be visible. The gap between the most affluent and the most deprived areas will already be evident in toddlers’ groups and nurseries across our communities. For Labour Members, tackling these inequalities is a fundamental goal. We wanted to be elected to eradicate this unfairness. I am therefore keen to hear from the Minister how this Bill could further the Government’s ambitious tackling child poverty strategy.
I want to speak about the growing number of babies across the UK who are born as the result of a surrogacy arrangement either here in the UK or abroad. We cannot be absolutely sure how many babies have been born through a surrogacy arrangement, but what we do know is that the number of parental orders granted by the courts, in line with the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, increased from 132 in 2011 to 450 in 2021. The number of babies being born as the result of surrogacy is far more than the handful of cases that the Surrogacy Arrangements Act 1985 had intended to cover. The growing number of babies being born as the result of surrogacy arrangements poses a serious issue that we as legislators must address.
I do not intend to cover all the points today, but I want to cover two areas in particular. The number of UK nationals using commercial surrogacy arrangements abroad is on the rise. The explosion in international surrogacy is estimated to be worth a $200 billion industry by 2032. Too many babies in their first 1,001 days are being left in legal limbo, because the Surrogacy Arrangements Act did not legislate for overseas commercial surrogacy arrangements, and, as far as I am aware, this place has not taken a view or held a debate on this issue. My position is clear. We should follow our EU partners in Spain, France and Germany in banning surrogacy and, at the very least, we should work in this place to prevent the harms caused by international surrogacy.
The failure of this House to have debated the increasing use of international surrogacy arrangements has resulted in different rules applying between adoption and surrogacy. For instance, the Children and Adoption Act 2006 places a duty on the Secretary of State to maintain and publish a list of countries where restrictions on inter-country adoption apply, yet a similar process does not exist for surrogacy. In 2021, the then Secretary of State used his power to place Nigeria on the list of restricted countries, therefore preventing all adoptions between the UK and Nigeria. The reasons given for this decision, which is still in place today, include unreliable documentation, corruption and evidence of child trafficking.
Those harmful and illegal practices, however, are not isolated to adoption. For example, earlier this year, a Nigerian police force made five arrests exposing child trafficking and an illegal surrogacy syndicate under the guise of an orphanage. There is no law currently preventing a child born in such circumstances from being brought to the UK. This void in legislation creates a vacuum where children’s welfare and children’s rights are left unprotected while fuelling the international surrogacy syndicates that put women and girls in developing countries at further risk.
My second point is that the procedures and guidance about surrogacy that are available to midwives, doctors, nurses and health teams on maternity wards are often out of date and very patchy. In some parts of the country, midwives may experience a number of births involving a surrogate; others may see very few or none at all. It is therefore even more important that up-to-date guidance is available with the very best information, so that the care of the mother and child, both pre and post birth, is the very best it can be.
Through freedom of information requests to all Scottish NHS boards, I have discovered that only NHS Ayrshire and Arran and NHS Fife have active guidance in place for midwives and clinician teams on the care and treatment of surrogate mothers and babies to ensure that the law is followed and to set out where they can access support. Of the other Scottish NHS boards, five have no policy at all, one has a draft policy, four have a policy on which a review is overdue, and one refers to the Department of Health and Social Care guidance. Midwives across Scotland are being left to their own devices in ensuring that babies born under a surrogacy arrangement receive uninterrupted care and treatment. I encourage the Department of Health and Social Care to ensure that maternity wards and midwives across England are not left in the same position.