National maternity standards are set to be reintroduced under plans to improve maternity care, Health Secretary Yvette Cooper has said.

The standards will be measured by patient experience and will incorporate an early warning system to signal underperformance.

The announcement follows a review into maternity care, led by Baroness Valerie Amos, which concluded families have suffered from repeated failures in NHS care.

Speaking to The Guardian, Ms Cooper said a new maternity taskforce will establish standards to end the postcode lottery of care and tackle racial inequalities in maternity services.

She also told the newspaper that women should not feel pressured to have an “ideal birth”.

The Amos review previously drew criticism over claims that 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 told the newspaper: “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.”

After the review, the Government pledged to introduce a national maternity commissioner to drive change, which Ms Cooper told the newspaper she was committed to doing.

“In the end, the most important people in the maternity services are the mothers, babies, the families.

“But the point of having a maternity commissioner is to make sure that those issues are championed as part of an NHS,” she said.

Ms Cooper, who was a health minister under the Tony Blair government and was the first British government minister to take maternity leave, went on: “It feels incomprehensible that we could be in this situation in the 2020s.

“I went back to look at some of the things that we’d done 25 years ago.

“And what did strike me was how much we were talking then about women and families being at the centre of care and about listening to women’s views.

“It is really shocking and distressing feeling that has somehow been lost in some of the maternity units where actually it should be the central issue.

“I had a direct interest. I was pregnant at the time.

“But I am really struck by it now, just feeling like there is this big gap in the priorities that the NHS has been focused on.

“The thing that struck me most was the sense of women feeling they weren’t being listened to … and I think that probably does go back to issues around culture.”