One of the most shocking statistics relating to children in our country is the fact that five lives under the age of 14 would be saved each day if our record on child mortality was the best in Europe - that's the equivalent of 1600 avoidable child deaths a year; a truly startling figure.

Our Olympic and Paralympic heroes deserved every bit of the great parade we saw last week. But why didn't this celebration happen again yesterday? That's when the UN announced that the number of children dying each year under the age of five has fallen by 41% since 1990. While 12 million died in 1990, just under seven million lives were lost in 2011. That's 14,000 a day less than were dying in 1990. The progress made in reducing child deaths must be one of the biggest success stories of the last decade. Yet there was no tickertape parade.