All’s fair in opposition politics, but the Conservatives really pushed the boundaries with their claim that women were being forced to give birth in the lift because of cheeseparing in the NHS.

 The claim, reported in several papers including the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, was that last year nearly 4,000 women in England gave birth in a place other than a designated labour bed – up from 3,500 in 2007.
 
Babies were delivered in ambulances, hospital car parks, lifts, corridors, toilets, A&E departments, minor injury units and medical assessment areas. So what’s new? Babies have always turned up unexpectedly and little or no evidence was presented to show that this increase (if it was an increase) had anything to do with the well-known problems in maternity services.
 
The NHS has been caught out by a rise in the birthrate, and moving with its usual lack of urgency has so far failed to increase services to match. Many maternity units are clinging on by their fingernails, struggling to keep up good standards but overwhelmed by sheer numbers. This has been well-documented, not least by the Healthcare Commission before it was swallowed up by the Care Quality Commission.
 
The Conservatives collected their figures by asking all hospital trusts in England that provide maternity services (147) how many women in 2007 and 2008 gave birth in locations other than a labour bed or a birthing pool. The response was good, with 117 hospitals (80 per cent), providing some or all of the figures requested.
 
The total, 7,368 for the two years combined, includes 2,997 babies born at home when the intention had been a hospital birth. Another 608 were born in transit to hospital, 63 in an ambulance, 121 in minor injuries units or A&E, ten in car parks and 13 in maternity reception areas. All these, we can assume, arrived earlier than expected with no clear evidence that the place of birth could be blamed on overcrowding – though it is possible, to be fair to the Conservatives, that the instruction to women given by some units not to come into hospital until labour was well-advanced could have accounted for some of them.
 
That leaves just 270, over two years, born in hospital but not in designated labour beds. There were 135 of these births in 2007, and 135 in 2008: no increase at all, as if an increase over a single year is meaningful anyway. What about earlier years? No directly comparable figures exist.
 
The shadow Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, said: “New mothers should not be put through the trauma of having to give birth in such inappropriate places. While some will be unavoidable emergencies, it is extremely distressing for them and their families to be denied a labour bed because their maternity unit is full.”
 
That may be true, but the Conservatives didn’t actually ask how many of these deliveries took place other than where they were intended to because the maternity unit was full. That would have been a more meaningful figure. They have, earlier, sought figures on how often maternity units have closed their doors because they were full, and found that 48 per cent of the trusts that responded had done so at least once during 2008. There were 553 such closures in 2008, against 402 in 2007.
 
So nobody need doubt the central claim that maternity services are under pressure. But the latest figures add, essentially, nothing.