Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will make it her policy to include stillbirths in the remit of Child Death Overview Panels.

Child Death Overview Panels are the responsibility of Local Safeguarding Children’s Boards (LSCBs). LSCBs in England have a responsibility under the Children Act 2004 to conduct child death reviews for all under 18s who die and who were normally resident in their area. They are required to collect and analyse information relating to the deaths in order to identify:

- any cases which may also require a serious case review;

- any matters affecting the safety and welfare of children in that area; and

- any wider public health or safety concerns arising from a particular death or patterns of death.

Stillbirths are not within their legal statutory remit set out in the Act and there are no plans to extend this remit.

We are however committed to reducing the number of stillbirths and want England to achieve the lowest rate of stillbirth and neonatal death in the world. The Department is currently working in partnership with the stillbirth charity Sands, and a range of key organisations including NHS England to take forward a programme of work on stillbirth prevention. Reducing stillbirth and infant mortality and improving the safety of maternity services improvement areas for the NHS in the NHS Outcomes Framework. In addition, the Department provided start-up funding for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ ‘Each Baby Counts’ programme, which aims to reduce stillbirths, early neonatal deaths and brain injuries due to incidents in labour in the United Kingdom by 50% by 2020.

NHS England has asked Baroness Julia Cumberlege to lead a major review of maternity services to modernise care for women and babies across the country, as first set out in NHS England’s Five Year Forward View.