The Liberal Democrats have adopted a policy of guaranteed one-to-one midwife care for every woman in labour, after members at the party's autumn conference in Brighton passed a maternity motion built around an annual £600m package. Sir Ed Davey has said the party would spend that sum on maternity services each year in government.
The vote converts what had been a leadership announcement into agreed party policy. It comes while maternity safety in England is the subject of a national investigation, announced by the Government in June 2025, covering 14 named NHS trusts.
The motion, which the party says members passed, was scheduled for debate on Saturday 19 September. It commits the party to four measures: 24-hour consultant obstetrician presence on every labour ward, guaranteed one-to-one midwifery care in labour along with 300 additional consultant midwives, a capital programme to repair maternity units and provide bereavement suites in every hospital, and an independent statutory National Maternity Commissioner. It also calls for the restoration of £95m in ring-fenced maternity service development funding.
Helen Morgan, the party's health spokesperson and MP for North Shropshire, has described the commitment as recurrent. "In our amendment, Liberal Democrats put forward an annual £600 million maternity rescue plan," she wrote in a signed article published on the party's Substack this month. The £600m is the party's own costing.
The Liberal Democrats have repeatedly said that 65% of maternity units are unsafe. Morgan wrote that "65% of units - yes, almost two in three - are unsafe according to the Care Quality Commission (CQC)." The regulator's published finding is narrower. Of 131 maternity locations inspected in England between August 2022 and December 2023, 47% were rated requires improvement and 18% inadequate on the "safe" key question, with 35% rated good. Those units were selected because inspection was overdue rather than as a sample of the whole estate, and on overall ratings 48% were good and 4% outstanding. The CQC's State of Care report for 2024/25 puts two-thirds of services at inadequate or requires improvement.
Roughly a fortnight before conference, Liberal Democrat amendments to a health bill seeking a statutory duty on the Health Secretary to ensure every maternity unit achieved a "good" or "outstanding" CQC rating were rejected. The party's drafted clause would have required a supporting scheme including 24/7 consultant obstetrician cover, one-to-one midwifery care, a Director of Midwifery in every maternity service, ring-fenced funding and a neonatal workforce plan.
On the estate, NHS England's maternity and neonatal infrastructure review, published in September 2025, found that over half of organisations reported the formal condition of their maternity and neonatal buildings as unsatisfactory, with 42% needing major repair or replacement and 7% at serious risk of imminent failure. Those figures were self-reported by trusts and set against a £13.8bn maintenance backlog across the whole NHS estate.
NHS Resolution's accounts for 2024/25, published in July 2025, record £1.3bn in clinical negligence payments relating to maternity, within a total of £3.1bn, and a £60.3bn provision for future liabilities as at 31 March 2025.
The funding the party wants restored was reported by the Health Service Journal in April 2025 to have fallen from £95m in 2024-25 to £2m the following year. Angela McConville, chief executive of the NCT, said at the time: "These cuts would devastate the work that has been underway to drive maternity safety improvements in the UK."
The £600m plan was first launched on 26 March, when Davey visited Eastbourne with the local MP Josh Babarinde. At Brighton the party's stated conference priorities were tax cuts and Europe, with the maternity pledge a secondary theme.
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