Sir Jeremy Hunt

I thank the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Andy MacNae) for that excellent opening speech. I also thank him and the hon. Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh) for co-sponsoring the debate with me. Most of all, however, I thank the parents who have lost children, and who took me on a journey on this issue when I was Health Secretary. I am thinking of James Titcombe, who lost his son Joshua at Morecambe Bay; of Carl Hendrickson, who lost his wife Nittaya and his son Chester at Morecambe Bay; of Richard Stanton and Rhiannon Davies, who lost their daughter Kate at Shrewsbury and Telford; of Derek Richford, who lost his grandson Harry at East Kent. They, and many others, are watching this debate and can see that the Health Secretary is here. I thank her for being here for this Backbench Business debate; it means an awful lot, and I know that she cares about the issue. I start by recognising that some progress has been made. Since I first stood at the Dispatch Box in 2014 with the Morecambe Bay inquiry, which was the first of many maternity safety inquiries, the neonatal deathrate has fallen by 21%—about 700 fewer deaths a year—but that is not good enough. The fall in death rates plateaued in 2020 and has not got much better, and since then we have had a worrying rise in maternal deaths. The 2025 target to halve neonatal deaths that I set in 2017 was missed. There are three problems behind our lack of progress. First—and this is something for which I am partially responsible—there are too many recommendations. Earlier this year, Baroness Amos counted 748 maternity safety recommendations, mainly since 2015. The NHS is a world champion at doing reports into maternity safety, but sadly not a world champion at implementing the recommendations made. It is encouraging that the Health Secretary says that there will be a recommendations hub, but could she give it real teeth, so that there is a timescale within which the NHS will decide if it is going to adopt a recommendation and, if it is going to, a person responsible for implementing it within the vast labyrinth that is the NHS? Could she give a timescale so that we and our constituents all know that something really is going to happen?