‘We had to keep little Harriet’s body in storage until the trust admitted liability’

But they believe their two-year battle for the truth would have been avoided here, where coroners can investigate the circumstances of stillborn births.

Sarah, a physiotherapist, and Jack, an acute medic, both worked for the trust which runs Nottingham City Hospital, where Harriet was delivered nine hours after dying in April 2016.

“We had to keep Harriet’s body in the freezer for two years until they admitted liability,” the Banbridge woman told Sunday Life.

“These were our colleagues and friends and we were saying to them, ‘You have got something wrong’.

“There is no way we would have pursued legal action if they had said they had messed up… but they didn’t. They basically just ignored us.

“The £2.8m was calculated as loss of earning, loss of pension and psychological input, but it’s less than what we would have earned if Harriet was still alive.

“It’s estimated to have cost around £3.5m in total when you factor in legal costs. The thing is, it didn’t need to be that at all.

“If there was a coroner involved, we wouldn’t have had to do any of that.”

Sarah was 41 weeks’ pregnant when she went into labour for six days following a trouble-free pregnancy.

They refused any offer of special treatment by the trust and Sarah was convinced it was just a case of delivering the baby safely.

The couple were initially told Harriet’s death was due to an infection, but they immediately disputed the conclusion.

“We were sent an email asking us to attend a routine stillbirth meeting in the maternity department, and they told us she had died from infection,” said Sarah. “Jack is an acute medic, so we knew that it wasn’t an infection or isolated bug and there was no specific bug identified.

“We then pushed for an external report. We were not happy with that, [so we] got another external report which found there were 13 significant failings in my care.”

The Root Cause Analysis report by an external investigator, published in 2018, determined that Harriet’s death was almost certainly preventable.

Among its finding were an important omission of information on an antenatal advice sheet, a failure to take full clinical history and delays in applying appropriate foetal monitoring.

It also criticised the trust for a failure to follow the risk management policy for maternity procedures and highlighted a broader issue of poor safety culture and a lack of governance in reporting serious clinical incidents.

The couple were represented by Switalskis Solicitors, which took on the case on a no-win, no-fee basis, sparing the couple the prospect of mounting legal costs.

But it still had a financial impact on the pair, who have not returned to work since the settlement was reached last December.

“Neither of us could go back to work there and my husband’s contract ended,” said Sarah. “We were lucky in that were able to borrow money from family. People will settle for lower amounts of money because they need the income there and then.

“We are not sure what we are going to do, if we can even go back to the profession.”

In 2019 the Westminster government launched a consultation on plans to give coroners in England and Wales the power to investigate stillbirths, but a change is yet to be officially approved.

Coroners in Northern Ireland were given the power to investigate the death of a child that was “capable of being born alive” in 2013.

That came after a landmark Court of Appeal ruling into the case of baby Axel Desmond, who was pronounced dead at Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry in 2001.

His mother Siobhan went into labour, and his heartbeat was detected until shortly before he was delivered stillborn following an emergency caesarean section.

In November 2013, then Attorney General John Larkin directed coroner John Lecky to hold an inquest into the circumstances of Axel’s death.

Mr Lecky refused, stating that it went beyond his powers granted to him by the Coroners Act 1959.

After losing a judicial review of the decision at the High Court, Mr Larkin challenged the ruling in the Court of Appeal.

Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan, sitting with Lord Justices Sir Paul Girvan and Sir Patrick Coghlin, found in his favour, saying: “We are satisfied that the effect of Section 18 of the 1959 Act, as enacted, is that the coroner can carry out an inquest into a foetus in utero falling within that definition.”

Speaking after the ruling, Axel’s mother Siobhan said: “In a strange way, it’s Axel’s law, I suppose.

“You had this child, the lowest of the low. He wasn’t even a human being — until today. Axel did what he did just by existing, and I am so happy.”