Maternity deaths at 20-year high as NHS ‘ignores warnings’

Women’s deaths during pregnancy, labour or soon after giving birth are at the highest level for two decades despite the NHS receiving dozens of recommendations to act on life-threatening symptoms.

An investigation by The Times shows the NHS was issued with 67 separate warnings between 2013 and 2023 to take signs of potentially fatal complications in mothers — known as red flags — seriously.

Over the same decade, there was a 50% rise in the UK’s maternal death rate — defined as deaths in pregnancy, childbirth, or the six weeks after giving birth — from 8.54 deaths per 100,000 pregnancies in 2013 to 12.80 in 2023. The last time the rate was this high was in 2005.

The most recent available data shows 257 women died in the two years to 2023. The biggest killer was blood clots, followed by heart issues, suicide, stroke, sepsis and severe bleeding.

Over the past decade, a string of reviews have issued 748 recommendations for improving NHS maternity services across 59 official reports, yet death rates have soared.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has commissioned a national maternity inquiry led by Baroness Amos, a Labour peer, which is due to deliver its recommendations in the summer. Campaigners are sceptical about whether another report will result in real change.

Theo Clarke, a former Conservative MP who led a parliamentary inquiry into birth trauma in 2024, said it was a “national scandal” that maternal deaths were rising while “recommendations are ignored”.

She said: “NHS maternity services are swamped with recommendations from scores of reports, and still women and their babies are being harmed by a lack of focus and leadership necessary to implement them.”

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Source: The Times, 5 April 2026