Britain's new Health Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced a sweeping reform of maternity services, including the reintroduction of binding national standards that were scrapped under Conservative-era NHS restructuring. Cooper said a new maternity taskforce would develop guidelines aimed at ending unequal care across regions, reducing worse outcomes for Black and Asian women, and creating early-warning targets to flag underperformance before crises emerge. The pledge follows two major independent inquiries — into failures at trusts in Shrewsbury, Telford, and Nottingham — which found that hundreds of infant and maternal deaths resulted from staff ignoring mothers' concerns and a culture of institutional cover-up.