England maternity commissioner role would be ‘fundamentally dangerous’, says campaigner

The appointment of a national maternity commissioner would be “fundamentally dangerous”, a bereaved mother who founded a maternity safety campaign group has warned. Emily Barley, whose daughter Beatrice died because of failings at Barnsley hospital in 2022, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the recommendation for a maternity commissioner in England in the Amos review was “not going to do what we need to move maternity safety forwards”. Ministers have bowed to growing pressure by agreeing to recruit the UK’s first commissioner for maternity and neonatal care. Whoever takes on the role will pursue hospitals over persistent failures in care, ensure wide-ranging improvements are made and try to restore the faith of families in a maternity system in England that has been rocked by a series of scandals. James Murray, the health secretary, announced the move in response to Valerie Amos’s government-commissioned inquiry of maternity care, which concluded it was a system characterised by poor care and a failure to listen to women, and was plagued by racism and discrimination. But Barley, who co-founded the Maternity Safety Alliance, said appointing a powerful maternity commissioner would be “fundamentally dangerous”. “Concentrating all of the power and responsibility for turning around maternity services in the hands of one person is, in my view, just insane,” she said. “It’s not achievable. …