Campaigners March To Save Liverpool Women's Hospital

Lobbying Labour's Conference 2026

 

Campaigners gathered on Sunday 27th in support of the Save Liverpool Women's Hospital (SLWH) campaign, which wants the hospital to stay on its Crown Street site. They were protesting plans to move services out of the Women's and into the Royal Liverpool Hospital, and marched on to the Labour Party Conference at Albert Dock.

NHS Cheshire & Merseyside has proposed moving some high-risk births and complex gynaecology operations to the Royal. Campaigners fear this could be the first step towards moving services out of the largest women's hospital in Europe altogether. The Women's currently provides level 2 intensive care, and patients who need level 3 care are transferred between the two hospitals, which are 1.3 miles apart.

The march's message was: save Liverpool Women's Hospital, repair the national maternity service, and listen to women, including the 95,000 people who have signed the SLWH petition.

Speakers before the march and at its close included Felicity Dowling and Lesley Mahmood of SLWH; Sarah Woolley, General Secretary of the BFAWU; Chantelle Lunt of the Merseyside Alliance for Racial Equality; Ian Byrne, MP for Liverpool West Derby; and Lucy Williams, a nurse and Community Independents councillor. Kim Johnson MP sent a message of support. Writer, actor, singer and activist Tayo Aluko sang the march out, following the PCS Samba band, whose drumming drew applause from onlookers along the route.

At the Albert Dock, solidarity speakers came from Keep Our NHS Public and Portsmouth NHS campaigners. Another speaker described how badly migrant women are affected by NHS migrant charges.

Speakers returned repeatedly to a few points. Lesley Mahmood said the Royal is already completely overcrowded, with patients in beds in corridors. Chantelle Lunt highlighted the inequalities facing Black mothers, who are three times more likely to die in childbirth, while mothers from poorer backgrounds are twice as likely. "One way you don't respond to health inequalities is by removing a service that is in the heart of one of the most diverse communities in the UK for more than 10 generations," she said. Ian Byrne said women across Liverpool "deserve a fully funded, fully staffed and properly resourced women's hospital on its existing Crown Street site."

Speakers said the core problems at Liverpool Women's stem from the national maternity funding structure, as the maternity tariff does not cover the full cost of maternity services. Last year the government launched an investigation into maternity services in Britain, where poor and unsafe care has led to deaths, life-altering conditions and more than £27 billion in negligence claims.

They demanded that the government take urgent action to:

• implement the Ockenden and Amos maternity reports in full
• make maternity care safe for all mothers, including Black, brown and less well-off mothers
• invest urgently in maternity care to end unsafe conditions and tackle inequality
• fully restore a publicly owned, publicly provided NHS

NHS Cheshire & Merseyside said the change is proposed "because it's much safer to treat these very complex cases at an acute hospital, where other specialist surgeons and intensive care teams are all immediately on hand."

Campaigners say the record of maternity care in general acute hospitals does not support that claim. Reviews into failures and deaths have been carried out at Shrewsbury and Telford, East Kent, Nottingham and Morecambe Bay hospital trusts. The Ockenden report into Nottingham University Hospitals, published this year, found that 520 mothers and babies suffered potentially avoidable harm, and that 162 of them died after substandard care. aolosborneslaw

The government-commissioned national maternity investigation led by Baroness Amos, which reported in June, found the same pattern across England. Its team visited 12 trusts, spoke to more than 450 families and surveyed over 9,000 staff. It found staffing levels too low for demand, too little space and resource for increasingly complex pregnancies, and poor oversight by hospital boards. It also found units in such poor condition, with leaking roofs and fire hazards, that some rooms could not be used and women were forced to give birth in corridors. Women described a postcode lottery of care, and the investigation uncovered serious racism and discrimination. National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation review findings: Baroness Amos identifies failings across 12 Trusts +3
Speakers said the core problems at Liverpool Women's stem from the national maternity funding structure, as the maternity tariff does not cover the full cost of maternity services. They said moving services into an already stretched general hospital would not solve that.

The care board added that a public consultation was held over the summer, but no decisions have been made.

 

 

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