Streeting condemns leaders' cowardice over Nottingham maternity review

Senior NHS staff who refused to engage with the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust maternity review should be summoned before Parliament, former health secretary Wes Streeting said as he condemned their “cowardice” as “an insult”.

The review, described as the largest maternity investigation in NHS history, found that hundreds of babies and mothers suffered avoidable harm. It also concluded that leaders at the trust knew there were serious problems in the maternity department but failed to act, a finding that has intensified demands for parliamentary scrutiny of those who stayed silent.

Streeting’s intervention pushes the fallout from Nottingham beyond a hospital scandal and into a test of whether Westminster can still force accountability when public institutions stonewall. MPs are being urged to use parliamentary powers to compel evidence from senior figures who refused to co-operate with Donna Ockenden’s inquiry, leaving bereaved families without the answers they have spent years seeking.

The wider crisis was one of the reasons Streeting launched a national independent investigation into NHS maternity and neonatal services in June 2025, after meeting bereaved families and hearing repeated accounts of harm and poor care. The government said the maternity and neonatal problems it inherited dated back more than 15 years, underlining how long warnings about safety had gone unaddressed across England.

Nottingham is now the latest major trust to face scrutiny over catastrophic failures in maternity care. In Shropshire, the Shrewsbury and Telford maternity scandal had already raised alarms after failures there were linked to the deaths of more than 200 babies and nine mothers, while Parliament was told that 900 families had contacted the Ockenden inquiry. Those figures have become a measure of how deep the damage runs, and how much trust has been lost when leaders ignore repeated warnings.

For families, the issue is no longer only what happened in delivery rooms and wards, but whether institutions that knew of danger will be made to answer for refusing to cooperate. The Nottingham findings have sharpened the pressure on Parliament to show that the power to summon witnesses still means something.