This Week in Parliament

The largest maternity review in NHS history

House of Commons · 24 Jun – 1 Jul 2026

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.

Some reports are read; this one has to be absorbed. On Wednesday 24 June the Health and Social Care Secretary, James Murray, stood at the Dispatch Box to respond to Donna Ockenden’s independent review of maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust — “the largest into a maternity service in the history of the NHS.” It covers thirteen years, draws on accounts from 838 members of staff and the experiences of 2,536 affected families, and its findings, in the Secretary of State’s word, are “chilling.” Women were not listened to; staff shortages and lack of training were among the worst Ockenden had ever seen; bullying by doctors and senior midwives was rife; there was “a culture of cover-up at the highest levels of the trust,” and regulators who were “more concerned with protecting clinicians than with providing accountability.” Most harrowing of all were the failures in mortuary care — a deceased baby referred to as a “specimen,” another placed in a space already occupied by an unrelated adult, a third kept in a domestic fridge — details now the subject of a live police investigation. Murray apologised on behalf of the NHS, and announced immediate steps: Martha’s rule, the right to a second opinion, extended to all maternity and neonatal settings; the Care Quality Commission’s window to begin proceedings lengthened from three years to five; and the Hillsborough law’s duty of candour to be used to compel witnesses in the reviews still to come, in Leeds and in Sussex. As one grieving mother told him, “they put the fox in charge of the hen house.”

The gravity of it filled the week. The statement was repeated in the Lords on Monday 29 June, where Lord Kamall answered for the Opposition; and on Tuesday 30 June Murray was back at the same Dispatch Box with a second statement, this time on the national maternity and neonatal investigation — the review announced last year by Wes Streeting and carried out by Baroness Amos, whose report published that day. Amos gathered evidence from more than 10,500 people, met over 450 affected families, visited twelve NHS trusts and heard from more than 9,000 staff, and found a system “fragmented, overly complex and far too slow to learn.” Two of her figures should be read slowly: black babies are “more than twice as likely to be stillborn as white babies,” and black women “almost three times more likely to die during pregnancy or shortly after birth.” In response the Government will appoint the first-ever, statutory maternity and neonatal commissioner to co-chair the taskforce Murray chairs; publish national standards for maternity triage; and roll an anti-discrimination programme out to every trust. The refrain, twice in six days, was the same — that recommendations must not, this time, “end up on the shelf gathering dust.” The moral weight of the week is in whether that promise, made after Morecambe Bay, after Shrewsbury and Telford, after East Kent, is finally kept.

The rest of the Chamber ran, as ever, on trade, defence and borders. The week’s most-contributed proceeding by a distance was the Defence Investment Plan, set out on 30 June by the Defence Secretary, Dan Jarvis, and answered across 147 exchanges from 74 members. Steel dominated a second thread: on 25 June the Minister for Trade, Chris Bryant, made a statement on the Government’s new steel trade measure — “which will come into force on Wednesday 1 July” — citing a sector in “an existential moment,” its output down from 27 million tonnes a year half a century ago to just 4 million in 2024. Five days later Jim Allister of the Traditional Unionist Voice secured an urgent question on how those tariffs would bite in Northern Ireland, calling it “an inherent absurdity, and indeed a constitutional offence” that a part of the United Kingdom should have to ask its own sovereign Parliament whether British trade rules apply to it. Borders supplied the third: on 29 June the Minister for Border Security and Asylum, Alex Norris, made a statement on asylum accommodation — announcing twenty hotels for closure — and the next day the Immigration and Asylum Bill had its Commons second reading.

For all that, the division bell rang only four times, and all four on the Monday. The most contested was the Customs (Tariff and Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 4) Regulations 2026, carried 323 to 160 — the sole vote of the week to draw the Opposition out in real numbers. The other three were a carbon-budget package nodded through the same evening by margins of roughly three to one: the Carbon Budget Order (332 to 94), the aviation-and-shipping regulations under the Climate Change Act (329 to 94), and that Act’s credit-limit order (330 to 93). The legislative traffic was heavier upstairs. The Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill spent 30 June in Lords committee; the National Security (State Threats) Bill, which we found in Commons committee a fortnight ago, cleared its Lords third reading; the Armed Forces Bill, last seen pushed through Commons report stage on the day a Prime Minister fell, reached the Lords for second reading. And the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill — the vehicle by which the Government intends to bring in its under-16 social-media ban — received Royal Assent on 26 June.

Beneath it all, 2,157 written questions from 228 members. Health drew the most (242), ahead of Defence (220) and Housing (205). Two clusters defined the week, and the contrast between them is the story. One was the weather: a red heat warning produced 39 questions on “Temperature” from a dozen different members — schools and railways, workplaces and water supplies, hospitals and, memorably, road surfaces, which the Department for Transport confirmed are “typically tested to withstand temperatures up to 60 degrees celsius,” though “some roads may begin to soften at lower temperatures.” That is what a genuinely House-wide worry looks like — many members, one subject, arrived at independently. The other cluster looked nothing like it, and is our feature below: 41 questions on asylum accommodation, appeals and cost, from just five members, two of whom — Andrew Snowden and Rupert Lowe — tabled 31 between them. And the graver register was there too: Navendu Mishra pressed the Cabinet Office on the Infected Blood Compensation Scheme, which has now paid out “more than £2.1 billion” — another slow, unfinished reckoning with an institutional failure, rhyming quietly with the one at the top of the page.