Preterm Birth Committee Report

Baroness Sugg Excerpts

Friday 6th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sugg (Con)]

My Lords, when the House of Lords Preterm Birth Committee released its report in November last year, it was an important contribution to our national conversation about preterm birth. It brought overdue attention to a complex but urgent challenge that affects over 45,000 babies born prematurely in England each year.

As the report highlighted, while many premature babies go on to thrive, the reality is that preterm birth remains the leading cause of neonatal mortality and morbidity in the UK. It is also a contributor to long-term disability, childhood illness and immense emotional and financial strain on families. The report highlights the importance of action across this area.

In 2015, the then Government set an ambition to reduce the preterm birth rate to 6% by 2025. As we have heard, the most recent figures show that it is still hovering around 7.9% in England: that target will not be met. This is a failure not of will but of equitable access, resources, infrastructure and consistency.

We now look to the Government’s upcoming 10-year health plan as a real chance to change course. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has joined others, including the charity Bliss and the Inequalities in Health Alliance, in calling for clear, detailed and funded targets that address not only the rate of preterm birth but the inequalities that shape it. As we have heard from other noble Lords, rates remain highest among black and Asian babies and among families from deprived communities. These disparities are not inevitable; they are the result of systemic inequalities that we must confront directly. Like others, I am very interested to hear from the Minister where the Government have got in their consideration of future ambition.

The Preterm Birth Committee was absolutely right to stress that reducing the preterm birth rate is only part of the story; we must also improve the outcomes for families experiencing it. Too often preterm birth happens very suddenly, without warning or identifiable risk factors. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, in his comprehensive introduction to the debate, highlighted that parents can spend weeks or months in neonatal units, often in hospitals far from home, with limited accommodation, scarce emotional support and inconsistent follow-up after discharge.

The committee’s call to improve postnatal assessments and invest in accommodation on neonatal units is a powerful ask. The Government’s commitment in their response to the report to review funding in the next spending review is very welcome, but timelines and delivery are, again, key here. That is also true of our maternity workforce. Without adequate staffing and support, even the best-intentioned policies will fall short. As the Royal College of Midwives highlighted in its briefing, we need workforce planning to be much more joined-up. My noble friend Lady Seccombe highlighted the crucial role that midwives play. We need more midwives; therefore, we need to train more midwives, as well as retaining the existing ones, and we need to make sure that they are employed when they qualify. The revised NHS workforce plan, due this summer, should specifically address midwifery. Like my noble friend Lady Penn and others, I ask the Minister to confirm in her response that midwifery will be explicitly addressed.

We must also recognise that maternity safety does not begin and end in the labour ward. A life-course approach to women’s health that includes pre-conception counselling, support for mental health, smoking cessation and access to reproductive services is essential. Nearly one in five preterm births in England can be linked to socioeconomic inequality and, again, if we are serious about that prevention, we need a cross-government strategy that really tackles the root causes of poor maternal health. I welcome the Government’s commitment to revise the national maternity safety ambition and to include disparities in preterm birth rates among their priorities. As the RCOG president, Dr Ranee Thakar, said earlier this year, we need timelines, funding and accountability.

Looking outside the NHS to how employers can help on preterm birth, I welcome the implementation of the Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Act and acknowledge my noble friend Lady Wyld’s important role in taking it through this place. But we should also look to employers to do more to support their employees dealing with preterm births. They can do so more effectively by adopting compassionate, flexible and proactive HR and workplace policies. They can do this through enhanced parental leave—offering extended paid maternity and paternity leave in cases of preterm birth, starting from the actual birth date rather than the expected due date—and, through improved flexibility with remote working, phased returns to work, and improved emergency and compassionate leave policies. There are many excellent examples of best practice here, and I hope the Minister will discuss this further with her colleagues in the Department for Business and Trade.

I thank my noble friend Lady Bertin for proposing this report, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, who has obviously been an excellent chair, and all the members of the Preterm Birth Committee, many of whom have made powerful speeches today. The Preterm Birth Committee has laid out a blueprint for change and, if we act on all its recommendations and align that ambition with delivery, we can make meaningful progress not just in reducing preterm births but in transforming how we care for women and families at every stage of their life.