Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help tackle disparities in the provision of home birth services.

The Department and NHS England fully support women to make informed choices about their care, including the choice to give birth at home. We expect local services to work collaboratively to ensure the provision of safe, personalised care in all settings.

The Core Competency Framework, which sets out the essential training for staff to address variations in the quality of support provided, outlines that training should be tailored to specific staff groups, for example, home birth, or birth centre teams. Staff should also receive training in the management of emergencies, using clinical simulation at the point of care and across a range of settings, including in the community.

Integrated care boards are responsible for commissioning maternity services and for determining how those services are configured to meet local needs. There may be occasions when home birth services need to be temporarily suspended or interrupted for safety reasons. When this occurs, trusts are required to re-open services as soon as it is safe to do so and report it nationally through the Maternity and Neonatal SitRep reporting tool, which collects essential data to monitor the performance of maternity and neonatal services.

NHS England will be writing to all services and systems asking them to review their service provision.