A new national maternity and neonatal taskforce will meet for the first time next week, chaired by Health Secretary Wes Streeting. The group’s primary function will be to use the final recommendations of Baroness Amos’ investigation into maternity and neonatal services to form a national action plan to help drive improvements and “tackle deep-rooted inequalities”. The Labour peer’s final report is expected in June, but the “17-strong taskforce will start work straight away”, Streeting said. “We will be ready to drive improvement from the moment the investigation’s recommendations are published.”
The taskforce will also incorporate findings from the Thirlwall Inquiry, examining events at the Countess of Chester Hospital following the murder and attempted murder convictions of former neonatal nurse Lucy Letby. It will also incorporate findings from Donna Ockenden’s review of Nottingham’s maternity care, which is expected to be published in June. The group’s first priority will be to agree its terms of reference. It will hear from Amos at its opening meeting.
First announced by Streeting last summer, the taskforce will have 17 members, including him and women’s health minister Gillian Merron, who will be deputy chair. Senior NHS leaders, professional bodies, academics, campaigners and the bereavement charity, Sands, are all represented on the group. Four places are taken by representatives of harmed or bereaved families. Each member of the taskforce will represent a larger “expert reference group”. While further details of these have not been provided by the government, original proposals seen by the New Statesman in November said these groups would likely be made up of 15 to 20 members.
The family representatives include parents who have been failed in some of England’s most infamous maternity scandals. Helen Gittos, whose baby Harriett died at East Kent in 2014, is one. “No one can be in any doubt about the scale and seriousness of the problems in maternity services,” she said. “I look forward to working with Wes Streeting to ensure that the changes that are so urgently needed are properly implemented.” Alongside her will be Gary Andrews, whose daughter Wynter’s death is part of the review into Nottingham maternity services – the largest such investigation in NHS history. Lauren Caulfield, who successfully campaigned for Leeds to have its own independent maternity review, is another family representative. “I welcome the creation of the taskforce and the opportunity to contribute in whatever way I can, particularly in addressing the stark inequalities that continue to exist in maternity services,” Caulfield told the New Statesman.
The choice of family representatives is noteworthy, for it includes those who have been highly critical of the national maternity investigation so far. The government seems acutely aware of the need to keep families at the heart of any improvement process. Caulfield told me the current plan “still does not go far enough”. She remains firmly in favour of a statutory public inquiry into maternity service, believing this is “necessary to fully understand the true scale and causes of harm.” However, she hopes the work of the taskforce will be “a meaningful step towards the level of transparency, accountability and change that families deserve.” Gittos has also criticised the Amos review for giving families little notice ahead of meetings. “There’s a risk that families will feel that such engagement is tokenistic and not meaningful”, she told the BBC in November.
When proposals for the taskforce were first revealed by the New Statesman in November 2025, some families found serious fault with them. Bereaved mother and maternity campaigner Emily Barley branded the plans “tokenistic and insulting”. “The starting principle,” she argued, “should be to have at least 51 per cent of any taskforce made up of harmed families”. Little appears to have changed since then: the number of family representatives has risen from three to four – a little over a quarter of the non-ministerial posts on the taskforce – but perhaps this will be enough.
The Maternity Safety Alliance (MSA) of more than 200 bereaved and harmed families also wrote to Streeting in July 2025, warning him that previous working groups on maternity had been “dominated by organisations” that, they believed, “have been and continue to be part of the problem”. This included the royal colleges and “others who are driven by ideology at the cost of safety”. The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) will both sit on the taskforce.
But families who have been failed by NHS maternity services do not speak with one voice. Others strongly believe that change can only come from the involvement of the professionals at the heart of the maternity system. Gittos said: “I hope the professional bodies concerned will come together to bravely, boldly and decisively take the decisions that will create services that women can trust.”
The taskforce aims to meet regularly, with each representative meeting their expert reference group beforehand so that they can feedback a wide range of views. The government has not ruled out refining the taskforce’s membership further, once Baroness Amos has published her final recommendations.
The government has also said today that it will “unlock” £25 million to help NHS trusts enhance their bereavement facilities and improve triage services for women who experience unexpected complications during their pregnancy.
[Further reading: The rise of the undecided voter]
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