The Ockenden Review painted a deeply troubling picture of maternity care at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. It confirmed what families, NHS staff and previous reviews had been saying for years: not isolated mistakes but long-running failures across the service.

The Nottingham review examined the experiences of more than 2,500 families, more than 2,500 case reviews and engagement with over 800 current and former staff. It found that women and families were too often ignored, warning signs were missed and opportunities to prevent harm were repeatedly lost.

Within days, Baroness Amos’s National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation widened the lens by reviewing care across 12 NHS trusts. The same problems appeared across England. There were not enough staff, maternity services were struggling to cope with demand, leadership was often poor, organisations were slow to respond when harm occurred, and some groups of women experienced worse care than others.

Families affected by the Nottingham scandal are now calling for a statutory public inquiry into maternity and neonatal care across England, arguing that “safe care can only be consistently delivered when the full truth is known”. That call deserves to be taken seriously.

There must be real accountability. Some women and babies were harmed because individual professionals made poor decisions, failed to listen, ignored warning signs or fell below the standards patients have every right to expect. Where people have acted negligently, dishonestly or unlawfully, they should be held individually accountable. But individual accountability alone cannot fix the wider conditions that allowed these failures to recur across multiple organisations over many years.

But another inquiry, on its own, will not make maternity care safer. They make findings and recommendations to inform decisions made by others.

A statutory inquiry has legal powers to compel people to give evidence. That is one reason........

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