5th May 2025

An Open Letter to Mr Wes Streeting, Health Secretary

Dear Mr Streeting,

My fourteen year old son also lives in residential care and he has done for nearly three years now. In utter desperation and sheer agony, I made this decision in February of 2022 when I finally accepted that I could not cope, nor meet his many complex needs, on my own anymore. You see Mr Streeting, while my son is adorably innocent and loving, there is another side to his developmental delays in that he cannot cope with the world around him. When something occurs in his environment that he cannot understand or accept, he experiences violent meltdowns, tantrums and injures those trying to care for him, flees into danger, destroys property and injures anyone or anything that happens to be nearby. 

By the point I voluntarily placed him into residential care – although voluntary suggests that I had a choice, when indeed there were no realistic choices left open to me – I had spent years covered in bruises, bite marks, scratches and had been reduced to living behind locked doors, afraid to even take him outside for fear of what he would do next. On the final weekend that Adam lived with me, I had taken my son to our local GP’s surgery for an appointment, where in his distress at encountering an unfamiliar environment, he threw a hard plastic toy at a vulnerable elderly man who was also waiting for a doctor’s appointment. Called into the nurses office, Adam overturned chairs, screamed, threw himself onto the floor, punched the walls, tore a picture off the wall and tried to put his hand through a window before fleeing the room, running into the carpark and directly into the path of a moving car. 

Moving onto the chiropractor’s office, in an attempt to correct some of the pain I was experiencing as a result of long standing injuries, some inflicted by Adam, some acquired during the process of giving birth to him, the practice manager understandingly locked the outside door to contain my child within the practice, and tried to distract him while the doctor tended to me.  Adam screamed and thrashed on the floor and the moment the door was unlocked, he charged straight out into the road and into the path of an oncoming bus. Putting myself between them, I managed to get us both out of the road just in time.

The following day, I attempted to take my son to church, but again upset because he didn’t want to be anywhere other than in his familiar home environment, Adam screamed, punched the stone walls and threw a plastic child’s chair over the pews, nearly hitting an elderly parishioner as she tried to sing a hymn. We returned home after just fifteen minutes and I locked the door once more, trapped in my own home with my desperate, out of control, disabled son.

By this point, I had spent eleven years trying to contain these outbursts of violent behaviour, trying to soothe and comfort my son, trying to contain and even restrain him so that he could attend essential medical appointments and my body had borne more injuries than I can possibly convey in a single letter. I had spent years and thousands upon thousands of pounds battling for support for him, for us, for me and I had repeatedly been told variations upon there being no available funding, no available respite providers, education settings that were full or could not meet his needs and by that point, we had been assessed by thirteen (or so) social workers working for various disabled children’s services in both Shropshire and Yorkshire. At one point, one social worker described my son as the most challenging and dangerous child she had ever assessed in her career to date. At the time of her assessment, Adam had been repeatedly flicking a rubber string type toy directly into my late husband’s eyes, then kicking out and punching him when Chris tried to stop him from engaging in this activity.

This was not quite two years before my husband would die of cancer, which is of course a whole other story, leaving me to cope with our beautiful but incredibly complex and challenging son alone. And it was entirely alone, because Chris’s death occurred just three weeks into the start of the Covid19 pandemic, when all education, respite and social activities were closed for the rolling lockdowns that began 2020.  Having fought for years to continue my career, I finally had to admit defeat, resign my role as parish priest and university chaplain and begin to claim benefits for the first time in my life. Crippled with Long Covid that had destabilised my existing severe brittle asthma, I was also granted the highest levels of PIP and by both agencies, put into the category of not being expected to look for work because I could not do so, just breathing was an effort of monumental proportions. 

So I made the choice that no parent can ever conceive of having to make and in February of 2022, I signed a Section 20 Order and placed my beautiful, beloved son into residential care. As I wept over and over and over at the scale of my loss, the kind and gentle staff repeatedly assured me that there was only one of me and 48 of them; how could I have possibly expected to keep coping on my own? I heard their words and I appreciated their words but those same words did little to nothing to assuage my grief as I returned to my now empty home, having lost my husband and my child and my job and my health.

But here’s the thing that I have not yet told you Mr Streeting, none of this had happened by chance. All of it was avoidable. Things did not have to be this way. Because, one year earlier, in January of 2021, legal teams representing The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals had stood up in the High Court in London and admitted to 80% liability in causing my son’s avoidable birth injuries that had led to his disabilities. The remaining 20% was reserved for national policy, implemented by NICE, that meant pregnant women are not informed of, nor tested for carriage of the Group B Strep bacteria that can cause prenatal and post natal death, life threatening illnesses and lifelong disabilities. The local hospitals could accept liability for not noticing the implications of the developing Group B Strep Meningitis that was raging through my son’s tiny, newborn body and not providing timely enough care to reduce the impact of this, but they could not accept liability for national policy that prevents testing for presence of this deadly bacteria in time to prevent it. The combination of these two factors – avoidable medical negligence and avoidable neonatal infection – meant that after a healthy, full term pregnancy, my newborn son ended up spending 23 days in neonatal intensive care fighting for his life, and 7 of those days on life support as catastrophic seizures wracked both his body and his brain. I remained a patient on the maternity ward for 18 days as, during his birth, I had experienced a full pelvic split leaving me in agonising pain and unable to walk. 

You see, Mr Streeting, none of it needed to be this way. All of it was preventable and avoidable. With better, safer, maternity care, my son could easily have been a neurotypical, non disabled fourteen year old, safely and happily living with his mother, whose only concerns would have been whether or not he was picking up his socks. But because of a lack of safe maternity care, adequately trained and resourced midwifery and maternity departments in our NHS, my fourteen year old son instead lives in residential care. He will never be able to take GCSE’s, A-Levels or engage in higher education, he will never hold down a job, he will never get married or father children. He will never live the life that he could and should have lived if both he and I had received adequate and safe maternity care. Because of the hell that I endured, I also knew I could never cope with having another child.

Because that is the other element of my story: my son and I were also part of the Ockenden Review that closely examined failings in the maternity care, over generations, at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals. In March 2022, after years of fighting, campaigning, repeatedly telling my story to various media outlets and sympathetic journalists, I stood in a hotel in Shrewsbury listening to Donna Ockenden announce that while families like mine had spent years being told that maternity care in our area was safe and fit for purpose, that it was not. It had been proven beyond reasonable doubt to be inadequate, unsafe, and needed massive overhaul to prevent more tragedies like the hundreds of families whose children had died, whose wives, sisters and partners had died and whose children had been avoidably harmed and left disabled as a result of avoidable errors in their maternity care.

On that day as the news rocketed through national, international and even global news outlets of how horrific the situation had been proven to be, the government firmly committed to devote millions of pounds of funding to ensure that such situations never occurred again. They committed to learn lessons and implement all of the recommendations contained within the Ockenden Report to make sure that future families would never have to endure what my family and so many other families had endured. They insisted that this funding would be ring fenced to make sure it could never be taken away so that the deaths and avoidable injuries of our babies, our children, the women in our families would mean something, because they would never happen again.

As grieving families, we all wept – with relief, with joy, and also with never-ending grief that someone would finally be held accountable for our pain, for our losses, for our injuries and the deaths that had destroyed our families. On that day we truly believed that something was going to change in NHS maternity care and for the better. Never again would other families endure what we had endured.

And yet, fast forward three years – only three years after decades of fighting – and your government has announced that this ring fenced funding of £95 million pounds, dedicated to improving maternity safety will be slashed to just £2 million pounds. A pittance. A token amount considering the level of appalling safety failures that were allowed to continue over decades. This is a decision that spits in our faces. This is a decision that makes our years of campaigning meaningless. This is a decision that utterly invalidates our grief and dismisses our pain. This is a decision that says our voices, our sacrifices and our stories are meaningless to you and to your government. 

Shame on you. Shame on this government. Shame on this abhorrent decision, for which there is no excuse.

Our children matter. Our mothers, sisters, wives and partners matter. Safer maternity care matters. The cost to both the NHS and the government just of the failings inflicted on my family alone are already in the millions and will only continue to climb, because my son needs lifelong, round the clock care and he will do so for the rest of his life. Yet had both he and I been provided with safer maternity care, it was all avoidable – and this is not simply an allegation, it has been admitted and proven in court.

Mr Streeting, stories like mine abound in Shropshire, stories of death, grief, loss and avoidable injuries. Yet your government has not even had the decency to come and meet us or speak to us before making this catastrophic decision to slash funding for maternity safety. I challenge you to come to Shrewsbury and Telford, to look our grieving families in the eye and explain why you think this decision is in any way justifiable or acceptable. 

I, together with other affected families, look forward to your prompt reply.

Sincerely,

Charlotte Cheshire