Twelve NHS birth centre closures in England since 2019 alarm campaigners
Campaigners say NHS closures of midwife-led birth centres in England amount to a shocking restriction on women’s right to choose a midwife rather than a doctor for their baby’s birth. Twelve such units have shut since 2019. Six have closed permanently since Labour took office in July 2024: in Rossendale in east Lancashire, Edgware in north London, Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, Stafford and Lichfield in Staffordshire, and Pontefract in West Yorkshire. Four others have been closed “temporarily” for as long as six years, which childbirth groups fear means they will never reopen. Two more are offline because the hospitals that housed them are falling apart and will stay shut for several years until new buildings are ready.
Birth centres exist so women can choose a doctor-led hospital unit, a midwife-led centre, or a home birth. That choice is also being narrowed in England and Wales by NHS bodies suspending home-birth services for up to 14 months. Officials point to a nationwide shortage of midwives, a falling birthrate, more complex births and a rise in caesarean sections, and often say they cannot staff centres safely. Campaigners argue women are being forced to travel further, at higher cost and with greater uncertainty. The Royal College of Midwives warns that without NHS midwife-led care some may pay privately or give birth at home with no professional present.
Hazel Williams, chief executive of Birthrights, said place-of-birth options are not luxuries but about the right to choose what happens to one’s body. Tope Medupin, acting chief executive of the National Childbirth Trust, said crumbling estates and unresolved workforce shortages must not become the new normal. The Huddersfield centre closed in November 2020 as a Covid measure and has not reopened; Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Trust said it has no timeframe and any restart would rest on safety, staffing and local need. Ingleside in Salford, opened in 2018, has been shut since January 2022. Midwife-led births at Crowborough in east Sussex were halted in October 2025 after repeated short-notice closures; Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust has reviewed reopening but will not say what that would involve. Sussex Weald MP Nusrat Ghani, campaigning for Crowborough to return, said the trust had broken numerous promises and ignored thousands of local complaints.
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