‘It’s time for Labour to champion maternal mental health in NHS reforms’

The NHS’s maternity failings have been back in the news this week. While the headlines rightly focus on physical harm and negligence, there is a quieter crisis running parallel — the epidemic of maternal mental health struggles, which too often go unseen, unsupported, and untreated.

Every new parent deserves support, and every baby deserves the best possible start in life.

That’s why the Government’s new 10-Year Plan for Health must be a turning point for how we think about and care for people struggling with their mental health in the perinatal period.

One in four women experience a mental health problem during pregnancy or in the first year after birth. These conditions – including anxiety, depression, PTSD and, in rare cases, postpartum psychosis – are common, treatable, and life-altering. Left unaddressed, they can have devastating consequences for mothers, partners, babies, and families. And it doesn’t just take a personal toll – it also costs the UK an estimated £8.1 billion each year.

READ MORE: ‘Is the NHS 10 Year Plan Labour’s road to redemption after a bumpy first year?’

Yet despite the scale of the need, perinatal mental health care is still too often seen as secondary or optional. Services remain inconsistent, understaffed, and overstretched. Inequities persist – women from minority ethnic communities, those experiencing poverty or domestic abuse, and young mothers face some of the highest barriers and the worst outcomes.

I welcome the long-term ambition behind the 10-Year Plan for Health, embedding prevention, compassion and equity at the heart of our health system, protecting it for future generations.

I really welcome the establishment of the National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce within the plan. I commend the Secretary of State for recognising and addressing head-on the decades of failure within maternity services, which have too long put women and babies at risk. I’ve spoken to pregnant women suffering anxiety, fearful of the service they’ll receive, and parents whose battles for justice after maternity service failings triggers severe mental health challenges. We need to acknowledge the link between maternity provision and maternal mental health – and the work of the taskforce must place physical and mental health on an equal footing.

‘Three areas of focus’

With the 10 Year Plan now in place, we need three areas of focus as we move forwards.

First, we must sustain – and grow – investment in specialist perinatal mental health services, in both the community and inpatient care. Worryingly, the Royal College of Psychiatrists estimates that two thirds of ICBs planned real-terms cuts to perinatal mental health funding in the last year. This cannot be allowed to continue and I urge ICBs to keep a strategic focus on perinatal mental health.

Second, we need to make mental health support a core part of all maternity and postnatal care. Mental health must no longer sit on the edges of the maternity pathway – it must be woven into every stage, from booking appointments to health visitor checks. That means training staff to recognise symptoms, asking the right questions every time, and doing so compassionately, and creating clear referral routes so no one is left waiting in limbo. I want to see every single pregnant and new mum offered a mental health check-in.

Third, we must build maternal mental health provision into community services, and work across government departments to do so. The Government’s Best Start Family Hubs hold real promise. They could become trusted community spaces where families can find a community and get advice, including for their mental health. But this will only happen if they are designed with perinatal mental health in mind from the outset and led by people with this expertise.

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The 10-Year Plan sets out a vision and the work of implementing it is already underway. On perinatal mental health the actions will need to be wide-ranging, from workforce development and data collection to accountability and evaluation.

This is how we lay the foundations for healthier, stronger families, now and in the future.

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