Recommendation 10

HM Government Rejected

(1) The Government recognises that fathers and partners play a crucial role in the first year of their child’s life, through supporting the mother as well as caring for and developing a relationship with their child. The Shared Parental Leave and Pay scheme gives working families much more choice and flexibility about who cares for their child in the first year, and when. The Shared Parental Leave entitlement challenges the assumption that the mother will always be the primary carer and enables working parents to share up to 50 weeks of leave and up to 37 weeks of pay in the first year of their child’s life, if they wish. This enables mothers who want to return to work early (i.e. by choosing to take less than their full maternity entitlement) to do so and enables fathers and partners to be their child’s primary carer if the parents wish. The number of parents taking Shared Parental Pay is in line with predictions made when the policy was introduced and has doubled between 2015–16 and 2021–22. To support the scheme, in June 2021, the Government introduced the Shared Parental Leave tool which allows parents to check their eligibility and plan their leave. Parental leave and pay entitlements are a floor not a ceiling, and the Government encourages employers to go further where possible. Employers with strong parental leave policies, which may include equal parental leave, report benefits for their businesses including for recruitment and retention. (2) The Government acknowledges that greater transparency about family friendly policies may be helpful to some people looking to enter or return to the workplace. That is why the Government’s “Good Work Plan: Proposals to support families”, consulted on the introduction of a new requirement for large employers (250+ employees) to publish their family friendly policies. The consultation responses demonstrated that employers (particularly those employing staff across a variety of job roles) need the flexibility to be able to adapt their family friendly policies to specific workplace scenarios and points in time. The consultation also highlighted concerns from an enforcement perspective and potential unintended consequences. For instance, there are inherent practical and technical issues in defining what should be published - what constitutes a policy?–and that this was something best left for individual employers to determine, given their own specific situation. The Government’s wider policy aim is to encourage sensible conversations between employee and employer and what can work best in meeting both parties’ requirements. On balance, the Government concluded that imposing a one-size-fits-all approach to publishing family friendly policies runs the risk of tying the hands of employers and employees to have those discussions and reach sensible conclusions.