NATIONAL maternity standards will be reintroduced after a review called for urgent change, as families have suffered from repeated failures in NHS care.

Health Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced the standards will be measured by patient experience and instil an early warning system to signal underperformance.

A new maternity taskforce will draw them up with a view to end the “postcode lottery” of care and tackle racial inequalities in maternity services, she said.

Ms Cooper added that women should not feel pressure to have an “ideal” birth, after Baroness Valerie Amos’s review drew criticism over claims it was changed to remove criticism of a drive for “normal” births.

Dr Bill Kirkup, who chaired inquiries into maternity scandals at Morecambe Bay and East Kent, resigned from Lady Amos’s review in a dispute over “normal birth ideology.”

Ms Cooper said: “I would worry about any mum feeling pressurised that there is somehow a kind of an ideal birth experience to live up to, when it’s always different in every case — and you have to follow the evidence, you have to have informed choice.

“We’ve always said the NHS is about the cradle to the grave — I want to make it a personal crusade to put the cradle back at the heart of the NHS, and to have much more focus around maternity and child health, the very beginning of a family’s life, making that much more central to the priorities of the NHS, giving it the priority that it really deserves.”

The minister added that she was committed to meeting the government’s pledge to introduce a national maternity commissioner to drive change.