Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the baseline budget for the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch maternity programme is for 2019-2020, and how many maternity investigations he expects to be funded by that budget.

This response is based on information provided by the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB).

The 2019/20 baseline budget for the HSIB maternity programme is £16 million. This provides funding for 1,000 investigations each year.

HSIB has budgeted the cost of training maternity investigators at 3.6% of each investigation. This is equivalent to £684 of the £19,000. The training cost will be taken forward to future years as investigators are employed on a one-year fixed term basis or on a secondment.

The average time taken to complete the initial 14 maternity investigations is 35.7 weeks. The time spent on each investigation varies due to factors such as the complexity of the case, family engagement, trust engagement and availability of specialist advice.