Hospital managers have been accused of “burying their heads in the sand” after figures obtained by BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour revealed that a quarter of NHS trusts had failed to review their staffing needs for at least four years.

The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) has claimed that senior hospital staff were avoiding looking into staff shortages because they knew that they could not afford to plug any gaps.

Despite births in England increasing by a quarter in the last decade, the figures showed that 80 per cent of the 99 trusts, which responded to a freedom of information (FOI) request, still had vacancies in funded midwife positions.

The FOI request also revealed that 24.2 per cent of the 99 trusts had not reviewed staffing requirements in the past four years, 66.7 per cent in the last two, and nine per cent had done no assessment for at least a decade.

RCM chief executive, Cathy Warwick, described the lack of staffing assessments as ‘worrying’:

“The number of births is booming – 2012 saw more births than any year since 1971. And, even then, four in every NHS trusts say they have midwife vacancies, a situation that we feel is getting worse, not better. This has to change.

“This is a recipe for disaster and can have a disastrous impact on staff morale, burn out and sickness rates, which only make a maternity service even more short-staffed.

“We hear from some heads of midwifery that trusts are not conducting proper assessments of staffing requirements because they know they won’t be able to afford to implement the findings - so they bury their heads in the sand and stick with their out-of-date assessments that no longer bear relation to their needs and the needs of mothers and babies.”

Head of policy at Thompsons Solicitors, Tom Jones, said: “These latest revelations are deeply concerning, especially as they follow the evidence just a couple of weeks ago that new mothers are not being given potentially lifesaving advice because midwives do not have the time.

“Maternity services and the staff working in them are being stretched to the limit. Decreasing budgets and insufficient levels of staff put yet more strain on the midwives who are there, and the pressure that they are forced to work under is, frankly, alarming.

“The government can’t get away with glossing over these stats and must start to pay proper attention to an issue that has the potential to end up with patient safety being compromised despite the best intentions of hardworking midwifery staff. Midwives must not carry the burden for an underfunding of the NHS.”