Target for cutting premature birthrate in England will not be met, minister says

The women’s health minister has admitted there is no chance the government will meet its target of reducing the premature birthrate to 6% in England by 2025.

Preterm birth, when a baby is born before 37 weeks of pregnancy, is the biggest cause of death among children under five in the UK. The previous government set a target in 2019 to reduce the preterm birthrate to 6% by 2025.

But giving evidence to parliament, Gillian Merron, the parliamentary under secretary of state for patient safety, women’s health and mental health, said “this ambition is not going to be met”. In 2022, 7.9% of babies born in England were premature and an estimated 53,000 babies are born prematurely every year in the UK.

In fact officials told the Lords’ preterm birth inquiry that the rate of premature deliveries was increasing. Prof Donald Peebles, NHS England’s national clinical director for maternity, said the preterm birthrate for all gestations was going down, “not as fast as we would have wanted, but going down until about 2020”, but that since then had “clearly gone up”.

“Our best evidence would be that it has gone up again this year by a little bit. So there is no way that we would meet that ambition of going from 8% to 6%.”

The NHS is likely to change the preterm birth target, it was also revealed. Lady Merron told the Lords that she wanted to look at whether the goals needed amending. “I understand that [the 6% target] has provided a focus, but a focus isn’t what we need, we need to actually achieve,” she said.

“There are, of course, circumstances in which preterm birth is the right thing to do, and it feels a bit of a blunt instrument for measurement,” she added. “So when we look at what our next ambition is, I will be very keen to make sure it’s a more sensitive ambition to reality.”

A joint report in May by the baby loss charities Sands and Tommy’s found that the government was also offtrack with its target to halve the rate of stillbirths, neonatal deaths and maternal deaths by 2025. It calculcated that about 1,000 lives a year could have been saved since 2018 if the ambitions were met.

Dr Jyotsna Vohra, the director of research, programmes and impact at Tommy’s, said: “There has been an unacceptable decline in maternity safety over the past few years which is harming women and babies. Tackling premature birth must now take priority, to save lives and prevent the lifechanging health complications that can follow.”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said it was unacceptable that too many women do not receive the maternity care that they deserve. “This government is determined to change that and ensure that all women receive safe, personalised and compassionate care, and we will be providing follow-up information to the preterm birth committee in due course.

“We will train thousands more midwives and ensure that trusts failing on maternity care are robustly supported into rapid improvement.”