The largest maternity review in NHS history

The gravest business of the week was a report the House could barely bear to read. On 24 June the Health and Social Care Secretary, James Murray, responded to Donna Ockenden’s review of maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals — “the largest into a maternity service in the history of the NHS,” covering thirteen years, 2,536 affected families and 838 staff — with an apology, an extension of Martha’s rule to all maternity and neonatal settings, and a vow that its recommendations would not, this time, gather dust. The statement was repeated in the Lords on 29 June, and on 30 June Murray returned with a second, on Baroness Amos’s national maternity investigation and the first-ever maternity commissioner it will create. Around that reckoning the Chamber turned to trade, defence and borders: a steel trade measure taking effect on 1 July and Jim Allister’s urgent question on how it lands in Northern Ireland; the Defence Investment Plan, the week’s most-contributed statement; an asylum-accommodation statement and the Immigration and Asylum Bill’s second reading. The division bell rang just four times, all on the Monday, the sharpest a customs-tariff vote at 323 to 160. And of 2,157 written questions from 228 members, two clusters told opposite stories — a genuinely House-wide worry about the heatwave, and a concentrated press of 41 questions on asylum from just five members, the subject of our feature.

The most-asked subjects

A sample of the week’s questions