MP GUY Opperman has spoken about his experience of baby loss in a new interview.

It comes ahead of a Private Member's Bill due to be debated in the House of Commons.

The Miscarriage Leave Bill aims to increase the level of support bereaved parents receive, including creating more statutory time off work to allow victims to grieve.

Speaking to GB News, Mr Opperman said he backed the bill and admitted he felt some “pressure” to get back to work following the death of his sons Teddy and Rafe in 2020.

He told Gloria De Piero: “I was a Government minister at the time I lost my twins. I was taking forward two pieces of legislation, one of which was in relation to the triple lock. And no one else could do the legislation.

"I took a week off, and the House was sitting at that time when the boys got sick and then died. Then I went back to work, slowly but surely. I think it's a very difficult job to say you're not going to go back to work.

“There is a great deal of pressure in an employment situation that needs to be understood. Now, there is a bill going through the House of Commons, that I very much support which means when you have a loss that there is a degree of time off.

"The next day I was utterly useless as a minister and as a Member of Parliament.”

On the other measures he’d like to see introduced, the Conservative MP said: “The first would be a sort of uniformity of care throughout the country. So if you have a traumatic incident and lose a child in one trust, you can be treated very differently in that trust to another and that's not necessarily because they're worse or that they are better. It is because there just isn't really a standard practice, there isn't a degree of teaching and learning across different trusts.

“Also if you have a baby under 24 weeks, you can't validate its existence. You can't have a birth certificate or a death certificate. It's extraordinarily difficult, this certification of life or death, particularly when they're stillborn. It is very, very hard and that sort of stuff needs to change.”

Mr Opperman - who recently welcomed a baby boy called Christopher 'Kitto' - also said the House of Commons still had some way to go before it could class itself as family-friendly.

He explained: “I think we need more back office support for those parents who have children so that in reality, it works better for them. And we also possibly need some sort of parental pairing. The whips have tried to work on that. But then you get tight votes, and then things get complicated.”

The Shadow Minister for Skills and Further Education, Toby Perkins, also opened up for the first time on the loss of his twins Joshua and Jennifer in the interviews for Gloria Meets on GB News.