Women and Equalities Committee’s (WEC) report on paternity and shared parental leave

In the Plan to Make Work Pay, published in May 2024, the Government committed to reviewing the parental leave system within its first year of governance. To assist it, the WEC has published a report identifying various issues with the current parental leave system that it considers the Government’s review should address. We summarise the main ones below.

1. Statutory pay for family leave is less than half of the National Living Wage and is completely out of kilter with the cost of living, causing financial hardship to many households.
2. The UK’s parental leave system has fallen far behind most comparable countries, and the UK has one of the worst statutory leave offers for fathers (i.e. maximum of two weeks statutory paternity leave) and other parents in the developed world.
3. Although the Government has committed to making statutory paternity leave a day one right, this will only partially address the unfairness to new fathers unless the day-one right is also extended to cover statutory paternity pay.
4. The exclusion of self-employed parents from the statutory system causes financial hardship and associated family problems.
5. The shared parental leave system is flawed as the eligibility criteria are unnecessarily complex and very difficult for the average parent and employer to understand, deterring a substantial proportion of parents from using the scheme.
6. Single parent families are disadvantaged by the current parental leave and pay system.
7. The additional costs faced by parents with multiple births are not reflected in the paid leave system.

Overall, the WEC agrees with the Government that the statutory parental leave system does not support working families effectively and a full review of the system should be conducted. Its report also made several recommendations that it believes the Government should consider adopting as part of this review, such as: extending paid paternity leave, increasing the rate of statutory paternity pay to marry up that for statutory maternity pay and address the lack of provisions for self-employed parents.