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Opinion: If Andy Burnham wants to truly fix Britain, he needs to start with maternity care

Opinion: If Andy Burnham wants to truly fix Britain, he needs to start with maternity care

Our year-long MadeForMums investigation suggests there are few issues more deserving of urgent attention than maternity care.

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Ruairidh Pritchard

Published: July 17, 2026 at 6:24 PM

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Every incoming prime minister arrives with a phrase that is meant to define them. For Andy Burnham, it is courage.

In his first speech as Labour leader, he promised the "courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected". He spoke about growth, about devolving power from Westminster, about giving communities greater control over their futures. It is the language of renewal, the promise of a country ready to turn the page after years of drift.

But governments are rarely judged by the poetry of their first speech. They are judged by what they choose to notice.

Politics has an uncanny ability to overlook the places where life actually happens. Westminster debates defence, infrastructure and the economy in abstract terms, while millions of people experience the state in far more intimate ways, at the GP surgery, in the classroom, in the social security system, and perhaps nowhere more profoundly than in a maternity ward.

If Burnham genuinely wants to fix the things Britain has neglected, there is a compelling case that maternity care should sit at the very heart of that mission.

Over the past year, MadeForMums has been investigating the state of maternity care across the UK. It has been the largest editorial project we've undertaken, drawing on more than 200 Freedom of Information requests, analysis of every CQC maternity safety inspection published since 2014, and NHS records covering more than 2.7 million births.

The picture emerging is not one of a service experiencing isolated failures. It is one of a system that has repeatedly failed to recover since the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the NHS, even as countless reports, reviews and inquiries have called for change.

Our first investigation revealed a stark finding. Not one NHS maternity service in England with a published Care Quality Commission safety rating is currently rated Outstanding for safety.

Statistics can become strangely numbing. They flatten human experiences into percentages, inspection reports and league tables. Yet every inspection rating represents thousands of births, thousands of parents walking through hospital doors carrying equal measures of excitement and fear, trusting that one of the most significant days of their lives will also be one of the safest.

For too many families, that trust is broken.

Alongside our investigation, new research from the Birth Trauma Association lays bare what happens after the hospital discharge papers are filed away.

The association has heard from women who are now frightened of healthcare itself, avoiding appointments because hospitals had become associated not with healing but with fear, women who no longer feel able to return to work full time because of ongoing injuries, fathers who have rearranged their career to become a carers for partners affected by failings in maternity care, and overwhemlingly, families that have decided that one child is enough, not because they always planned it that way, but because they cannot face going through childbirth again.

That leaves a generation of children growing up in households still shaped by unacceptable healthcare failings inflicted on their parents the day they were born.

This is why reducing maternity care to an NHS issue fundamentally misses the point.

Good maternity care is an economic policy, a women's health policy, an employment policy, a family policy, and crucially, a mental health policy.

Burnham has spoken about creating an "authentically Labour" programme of renewal and about returning power to communities. Few public services are more rooted in communities than maternity units. They are where almost every family begins its relationship with the NHS as parents rather than patients. They shape confidence not only in healthcare but in government itself.

When a family feels safe, listened to and cared for during one of life's most vulnerable moments, trust in public institutions grows. When that experience ends in preventable harm, trauma or years of unanswered questions, that trust becomes much harder to rebuild.

Burnham says he wants to fix the big things politics has neglected. If that includes giving every child the best possible start in life, that promise has to begin before a baby has even left the hospital.

Authors

Ruairidh PritchardDigital Growth Lead

Ruairidh is the Digital Lead on MadeForMums. He works with a team of fantastically talented content creators and subject-matter experts on MadeForMums.