PARENTS across Oxfordshire and across the country have been left to fall between the cracks.

Not being able to get a birth certificate for your new baby for a few months doesn't sound like a problem, but when it becomes one it can derail families' lives, as our special report today finds out.

It is hard, reading it, not to feel as if all these families were simply forgotten about when the government took its sweeping decision to suspend birth registration services across the country.

You might think the cases we feature today are quite exceptional – but how many exceptional cases do you need before the exception becomes the rule?

This is just a very small sample of the families affected.

This problem follows a string of other groups who were left to fall between the cracks in the government's coronavirus response, including adults with learning disabilities – whose concerns we have also reported on – and of course residents of care homes, who seemed to be spectacularly forgotten about.

We hope our report shows any families who thought they were alone in their struggle that the opposite is true.