Wes Streeting has announced an independent investigation into maternity and neonatal service failures in Leeds following campaigning by bereaved families.
Parents have welcomed the launch of the independent investigation into Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, where they say their babies were harmed due to failures.
The health secretary, who met the families on Thursday, said he was “shocked” by their experiences of “repeated maternity failures in Leeds – made worse by the unacceptable response of the trust”.
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust was previously only set to feature in a national rapid review of maternity services launched by the health secretary this summer, into 14 hospital trusts. This review is being led by Baroness Amos.
However, families have campaigned for an independent inquiry similar to those launched for Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals Trust (SATH) and Nottingham University Hospitals Foundation Trust (NUH).
It comes after a report by the National Audit Office warned the UK is spending billions in negligence claims linked to failures by NHS maternity services.
Announcing the review, Mr Streeting said there was a “ stark contradiction between scale and safety standards is precisely why I’m taking this exceptional step to order an urgent inquiry in Leeds.”
He added: “We have to give the families the honesty and accountability they deserve and end the normalisation of deaths of women and babies in maternity units.
“These are people who, at a moment of great vulnerability, placed their lives and the lives of their unborn children in the hands of others – and instead of being supported and cared for, found themselves victims.”
Families have called for Donna Ockenden, who is currently chairing the Nottingham inquiry and led the Shrewsbury inquiry, to head up the investigation in Leeds. They have also said the police should be involved, as forces in both Nottingham and Shrewsbury have also launched investigations.
The inquiry into Nottingham hospitals was launched following reports by The Independent revealing dozens of allegations of harm and poor care.
In March 2022, the Ockenden review into SATH found 200 babies died or were left with brain damage due to failings by the trust’s maternity services.
The NUH review is so far the largest ever inquiry into maternity failings and is looking into around 2,500 cases of alleged poor care. The final report into NUH is expected to be published in June 2026.
Fiona Winser-Ramm, whose daughter Aliona died in 2020 after what an inquest found to be a number of failures, is “welcoming the inquiry to ensure that it’s the best and most thorough that it can possibly be and it is imperative that Donna Ockenden is appointed to lead this review”.
She added: “We have all been thrust into this life that none of us should be living.
“None of us should know each other. The only place that we should ever potentially have become friends is through a baby or a child playgroup – instead, we are supporting each other through the worst possible time.
“But this is a compulsion and we have no choice in this matter.
“This is the only way that we can now parent our children. Our girls all deserved a voice. They all deserved a life, and we deserved that life with them.
“Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust has stolen that from all of us. We now have to be the voice for our children, but that also goes wider to being the voice for other women and children, because everybody deserves to be safeguarded.”
The terms of reference for the Leeds review have yet to be published, and a chair has yet to be announced.
In June, the Care Quality Commission downgraded the trust to “inadequate”, citing serious risks to women and babies and a deep-rooted “blame culture” that left staff afraid to speak up.
Whistleblowers have warned that units remain unsafe, and the BBC reported that at least 56 baby deaths between January 2019 to July 2024 might have been preventable with better care.
Lauren Caulfield, whose daughter Grace died in the days before her birth in 2022, said: “Something had gone very, very wrong and what I found after was such a refusal to admit their faults, to be honest with me about what had been going on about the failings of individuals, a very, very defensive kind of leadership team.
“I was so dismissed and gaslit and almost blamed for a lot of things that happened in my experiences.”
She said the families want Ms Ockenden to lead the inquiry as they feel “no-one else has the experience, the expertise, the trust of families and staff, the compassion and the capability to investigate a trust of this size and we’ve been very clear with the secretary of state that it must be Donna and her team”.
