Maternity care really does matter, according to the Government. In April 2007 it named its blueprint for maternity services Maternity Matters, and guaranteed that by the end of this year the National Health Service in England would deliver a “world-class maternity service” to all new mothers.

With eight months to go until the policy is implemented, the picture is looking patchy. We are now into our seventh year of a baby boom. There were almost 110,000 more births last year than at the start of the decade.

Delivering more and more babies will require a greater investment and commitment to maternity services.

It may surprise you, therefore, that maternity care has not been at the front of the queue for the extra investment that has flowed into the NHS. The share of the health service’s budget spent on maternity has dropped from 3 per cent in 1997 to 2 per cent in the most recent figures.

Meanwhile, the number of births has risen in every region of England in every year since 2002. Despite this, every region has cut its maternity budget at least once over that time, and some regions have cut their maternity budgets twice.

What The Times has now discovered is that many trusts have not been getting enough money to run their maternity services. Many have had to subsidise the service with money from other areas. This situation is hopefully now being rectified, with the Government reforming and increasing the money trusts get under the “Payment by Results” system for the work they do.

That is good news, but I am concerned that the public spending storm we are about to enter may undo this latest advance. I fear that we will see cuts to frontline services, including maternity care. Maternity services did not get the full benefit of extra NHS investment over the past decade. Our share of the NHS budget fell while the number of babies born rose. If maternity budgets were cut in the boom years, what chance do they have to survive the lean years ahead?

We need reassurance that with enough money finally going into maternity care, this will be sustained in the difficult years ahead. Meanwhile, the Government has given guarantees to women and their families about choice in their maternity care by the end of this year. We hope that these guarantees are met and that money promised for maternity services reaches the front line, as The Times revealed in an exclusive story last September.

This is what mothers and babies have been promised, and, quite frankly, what they deserve, because maternity matters.

Professor Cathy Warwick is general-secretary of the Royal College of Midwives

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