The question new baby laws must ask

Babies are safest with their married mum and dad, and the Government’s new figures say so. The death of any baby is an absolute tragedy, and we know many single parents do a wonderful job, often against the odds. We’re not blaming anyone’s relationship for a baby’s death. But a Government’s job is to promote what works, not to ignore it.

Last Thursday, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its count of cot deaths and other unexplained deaths of babies in their first year. In 2024, the rate was 0.17 in every 1,000 babies born inside marriage or civil partnership, against 0.46 in every 1,000 born outside it. So, a baby born outside marriage was more than two and a half times as likely to die this way. The new law for babies that MPs are writing, with the Government behind it, must count whether a baby’s parents are married, and as it stands it won’t.

The figure for 2024 wasn’t a one-off, because in every year back to 2004, the rate outside marriage was at least two and a half times the rate inside it.

Marriage isn’t just a piece of paper, either. Where unmarried parents registered the birth together and lived at the same address, the rate in 2024 was 0.27 in every 1,000, more than one and a half times the rate for babies of married parents. Where only the mother’s name was on the birth certificate, the rate was more than seven times the married parents’ rate.

The Government must act on what its own statisticians have counted. Instead, on 30 September, it announced that its Healthy Babies programme will reach “more than 1,000 hubs by 2028”, without once mentioning a mother, a father or marriage.

The law is the Infants, Parents and Carers Bill, and it goes to a committee of MPs on Wednesday 14 October. It names the three kinds of help it covers – for pregnancy or childbirth, for a baby’s health and development, and for “the relationship between parent or carer and infant”. The parents’ marriage isn’t one of them, and the Bill never mentions a mother, a father or marriage at all.

The Government’s own note on the Bill says its purpose is to make the needs of babies and their families “visible to Parliament”. In that case, the Bill’s yearly report must count whether a baby’s parents are married. As written, the report will look only at those three kinds of help. Ministers can’t add to them later, so whatever is missing now stays missing until Parliament passes a new law. That’s why MPs must put it right at committee.

Please write to your MP today, before the committee sits on 14 October. Make these three points – in your own words:

1. The Government’s own figures show babies are safest with their married mum and dad.
2. Yet the Infants, Parents and Carers Bill never mentions a mother, a father or marriage.
3. So its yearly report to Parliament must count whether a baby’s parents are married, and you expect your MP to press Ministers to make sure it does.

At C4M, we know a baby’s safest start is with its married mother and father, and that’s a start every mum and dad can give their child by marrying. These are the Government’s own facts, and we demand that Ministers act on them.