While the CQC says pregnancy and birth remain a positive and safe experience for many women and their babies, the CQC’s director of secondary care, Victoria Vallance, said inspectors were worried about the problems that continue to surface.

“We are worried. We are concerned,” she told the BBC. “We have not seen the pace of improvement consistently, nationally, that we would hope and expect to see across maternity services.”

This isn’t the first time concerns about maternity services in the UK have been raised over the last 12 months. Earlier this year, the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) warned that midwife numbers were continuing to drop just one year after warnings that England was facing a shortage of 2,000 midwives – and called on the government to fix the crisis in order to “protect the safety of care”.

More than half of maternity units in England and Wales are failing to meet safety standards