Paternity leave in UK is outdated and unequal, say MPs
The UK's statutory parental leave system is "one of the worst in the developed world" and has "fundamental flaws", a group of cross-party MPs has said.A report published today by the Women and Equalities Committee said paternity leave rules "entrench outdated gender stereotypes". It added that "bold" action is needed, but warned any changes would require significant investment.A Department for Business and Trade spokesperson said the government is carrying out a review to see how it best can support working families.
Introduced in 2003, statutory paternity leave allows most new fathers and second parents in the UK to take up to two weeks off work.It applies to all partners, regardless of gender, after the birth, surrogacy or adoption of a baby.Those eligible receive £187.18 a week or 90% of their average earnings, whichever is lower.This works out as less than 50% of the National Living Wage and fathers are ineligible for statutory paternity leave if they are self-employed or earn less than £123 a week.
The report says this is "completely out of kilter with the cost of living" and suggests the government should consider increasing paternity pay to 90% or more and paternity leave to six weeks in a phased approach.It recommends both aspects should be done during this Parliament.Highlighting how paternity leave has not changed noticeably since its introduction more than two decades ago, the report says: "We now have one of the worst statutory leave offers for fathers and other parents in the developed world."In Spain, new dads can take 16 weeks off work at full pay.New rules introduced in France in 2021 mean working dads can now spend 28 days at home while being paid.Families in Sweden are entitled to 480 days of paid parental leave, with 90 days reserved for fathers.
As part of Your Voice, Your BBC News we are covering the stories that matter most to you and several dads have been in touch about paternity leave.James Yeates, from Haverhill, Suffolk, says it was "horrible" having to return to work just two weeks after his son, Luca, was born in September 2024.Although he says the birth of his son was "the happiest moment of my life", he soon felt as though he was leaving his partner "in the lurch"."There would be times when my partner was struggling and I'd have to leave to go to work," he said."I felt like I was letting her down and letting my son down."James works for the NHS, who topped up his statutory paternity pay to 100% of his usual salary, but feels as though he was prevented from being "a more present parent".The WEC report also looked at shared parental leave, which was introduced in 2014 and allows parents to share up to 50 weeks of leave and up to 37 weeks of pay after the birth or adoption of a child.But the review found many families considered it "unnecessarily complex" and "burdensome".It is used in fewer than 2% of all births and a government review from 2023 suggests almost half (45%) of all dads were not even aware shared parental leave was an option.The report has been released on the eve of the world's first dad strike.Hundreds of fathers are expected to picket outside the Department for Business and Trade in London on Wednesday to call for an overhaul of the UK's parental leave policies.
New research by The Dad Shift and Shaun Davies MP suggests that just 3% of money spent on parental leave in the UK supports fathers and non-birthing parents.Information provided by employers to HMRC shows that £3.3bn was spent on statutory maternity pay in 2023/24.Across the same period, £69m was spent on paternity pay and £34.4m statutory shared parental pay.George Gabriel, co-founder of the Dad Shift, said paternity leave laws mean dads often have to go back to work before their two-week paternity leave ends."The pie is small and the crumbs left for dads and non-birthing parents are honestly pretty pitiful," he said.Kathy Jones, chief executive of the Fatherhood Institute, said she welcomed many of the findings of the report, but said "families shouldn't have to wait until the next Parliament for this to come in".The government said its forthcoming review, which is due before mid-July, would look at all current parental leave entitlements.A spokesperson added it is already in the process of ensuring dads no longer need to be employed for 26 weeks to be entitled to paternity leave."This government is committed to making sure parents receive the best possible support to balance their work and home lives," they said.
Additional reporting from George Walker.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
18 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Diane Abbott is pushing the Left's biggest myth about immigration
The Labour Left were always bound to loathe Sir Keir Starmer's recent speech about the downsides of mass immigration. All the same, one of their objections to it strikes me as somewhat peculiar. At a rally on Saturday, the veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott thundered that Sir Keir's speech was 'nonsense' – because, as she stoutly reminded her audience, 'immigrants built this land'. Stirring stuff. I can see only one small problem. It's not strictly true, is it? Clearly Ms Abbott disagrees. Indeed, she proudly declared that her own parents 'helped to build this country'. As she herself acknowledged, though, they only arrived here from Jamaica in the 1950s. What precisely does Ms Abbott think Britain looked like, before her parents' ship pulled in? A barren, primitive, uncivilised wilderness, whose humble natives dwelt in bushes and subsisted on nettles and raw shrew? Did her parents look around, sigh, and then patiently set about erecting St Paul's Cathedral and Blenheim Palace? I'm not convinced that they did. In fact, I'm reasonably sure that most of this country was built a fair bit earlier, largely by people who were born in it. This is because, until quite recently, only a very small percentage of the population was born abroad. Between 1951 and 2001, the average annual net immigration figure was 7,800. In 2023, by contrast, it was 906,000. It doesn't take a mathematician of Ms Abbott's stature to recognise that this is quite a sharp increase. Still, I don't mean to pick on her. She's far from alone. In recent years, any number of Left-wing politicians and pundits have taken to pushing the line that 'immigrants built Britain'. On last week's edition of the BBC's Question Time, for example, the retired trade union leader Mark Serwotka informed viewers that Britain is only 'the great country it is because of centuries of immigration'. From the Left's point of view, I suppose I can see this tactic's advantages. Any time a voter dares suggest that net immigration of almost a million a year is a touch on the high side, and possibly not entirely sustainable in the longer term, shut them up by telling them that a) it's always been like this, and b) they should be grateful. The risk, though, is that some voters might feel a tiny bit insulted. Because the claim that 'immigrants built Britain' implies that the natives were so ignorant, lazy and useless, they achieved nothing until their superiors arrived from abroad to lift them out of savagery. Come to think of it, I'm reasonably sure that the Left used to have a word for that type of attitude. It was 'colonialism'. If you want a picture of the present... It was a bright cold day in June, and Winston Smith had just sat down at his desk in the Ministry of Truth. This morning he had an important job to do. A dangerous book urgently needed to be memory-holed. It was entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four. For decades, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been acclaimed as a landmark work of literature. Suddenly, however, it had been found to contain the most sickening thoughtcrime. The person who had made this shocking discovery was an American novelist named Dolen Perkins-Valdez. In a foreword she'd been commissioned to write for the book's latest edition, she declared that its main character exhibited attitudes towards women that were appallingly 'problematic'. Not only that, but the book didn't feature any characters who were black. 'A sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find,' she wrote, 'in a novel that does not speak much to race and ethnicity.' Privately, Winston suspected that the reason the book did not speak much to race and ethnicity was that it had been written on a Scottish island by an Edwardian Englishman in the late 1940s. That was probably also the reason why none of its characters identified as genderqueer or pansexual, and why none of them had glued their buttocks to the M25 in support of puberty blockers for Palestine. But it was not Winston's place to make excuses for crimethink. In any case, he was used to such tasks. Not long ago he had been presented with the complete works of a children's author named Roald Dahl, and ordered to replace the entire text of each book with the endlessly repeated phrase 'BE KIND'. Had it been up to him, Winston would have been perfectly willing to rectify the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four, until all traces of crimethink had been eliminated. He could have ensured that it contained the correct number of characters who were 2SLGBTQIA+, neurodivergent or of Colour, and that they all expressed the officially mandated opinions about Islamophobia and net zero. The Ministry, however, had decided that there was no time. Better just to drop the offending object down the memory hole, and move swiftly on to his next task. This one was going to be tough. According to reports, there was a new TV adaptation of Harry Potter on the way, and the cast had completely failed to denounce JK Rowling. Winston had a lot of unpersoning to do.
BBC News
21 minutes ago
- BBC News
Earley MP Yuan Yang praises school's money-saving solar panels
A school will have more money to spend on education thanks to government-funded solar panels, an MP has government announced in March that it was investing £180m installing solar panels in schools and hospitals across the first 11 schools have now had them put in - including Whiteknights Primary School in Reading, which is expected to save around £4,500 a year as a result."Overall that means less money spent on energy and heating bills [and] more money to for the school to actually spend on students' education," said MP for Earley and Woodley Yuan Yang. The Labour MP visited the school on Monday, alongside climate minister Kerry McCarthy. She said she spoke to schoolchildren about climate change and how it should be tackled. "They wanted to talk about all sorts of things, from saving energy to transport," she said."It's often the children who asked the most incitive questions about climate change and the future."Climate minister Kerry McCarthy said the fact schools could save money on their bills was proof that the transition to green power could directly benefit communitiesGreat British Energy is a new publicly owned company set up by the Labour Yang said the solar panels, which would continue generating electricity throughout the weekends and school holidays to be sold back to the national grid, were "a really key investment"."All of this together is part of a diverse energy mix and the more different sources of renewable generation then the more robust - the more secure - an energy system is," she said. You can follow BBC Berkshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
BBC News
21 minutes ago
- BBC News
Thamesmead Waterfront: The London site with room for 15,000 homes
They are two vast sites on the banks of the Thames in east London and you probably haven't heard about the chances are you might are huge development areas called Thamesmead Waterfront and Beckton Riverside. Both are brownfield sites and are earmarked for huge housing developments of thousands of homes, shops and problem is these are among the few areas in London without a rail or Tube link and that is stalling the developers and the mayor want is a commitment from government to an extension of the Dockland Light Railway (DLR).Could that happen in the chancellor's Spending Review? Ed Mayes is the executive director for development at Lendlease, which will develop the Thamesmead site."Our priority for Thamesmead in particular is the DLR extension. We have already got commitment from the mayor and there is commitment from Tfl for the initial stage of funding," he told BBC London. "But what we really need is a government commitment that subject to that initial stage of work they are willing to help fund the actual delivery of the DLR."He says a transport link is crucial."It's been proven across London that transport infrastructure unlocks delivery of homes; that's happened with the Jubilee line and the Elizabeth line, it will continue to happen."This is an area of London that has amazing potential: there could be 15,000 homes at Thamesmead Waterfront, another 15,000 on the north of the river in Beckton - all unlocked by that extension."In addition, there's future potential if it was extended in the future. That will unlock homes, much-needed affordable homes for London, but also the jobs and enterprise that comes with that." It is perhaps no surprise that London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan is framing what transport infrastructure he wants in terms of course, creating housing through transport links is not a new idea in the capital. Just one example is the Metropolitan line creating the suburbs in the north west of London dubbed "Metroland".Today, the main projects on the City Hall wish list are the DLR extension to Beckton Riverside and Thamesmead Waterfront, the Bakerloo extension and the West London of them link areas where thousands of homes could be links do not come cheap though and are beyond the realms of Tfl's budget and so funding would have to come from government.A DLR link to Thamesmead would cost about £1.5bn and involve a tunnel under the Hall said in a statement: "The mayor wants to work in partnership with government to support the national growth agenda. With the right investment and devolution of powers, there is a huge opportunity to unlock growth; create new jobs; attract international investment; and ensure London contributes more to the national economy and the Exchequer's finances." Just down the road from Thamesmead is Abbey Wood. It got an Elizabeth line station three years ago. Once known as the cheapest postcode in London, the area is Lewis is executive director for sustainable places at Peabody, which developed the Southmere Lake site in Abbey Wood. "I think in any part of London that's changing, if there hasn't been an established market or people don't know the area, you need to give some confidence, you need a reason to come and visit," he said. "I think with the arrival of the Elizabeth line, people really understood that it was a new area opening up to a lot of Londoners so we saw people from east London coming here to visit for the first time and recognise all the open areas and green space."People started to recognise this was somewhere they wanted to view and ultimately move to."There have been objections to the Southmere Lake redevelopment, though, with opponents saying some of the homes demolished to make way for it should instead have been refurbished. As regards Thamesmead Waterfront, a project he is also involved in, Mr Lewis says transport infrastructure is critical."I think what's really exciting about the Waterfront is 100 hectares of land that's hardly been developed at all. In London terms that's unheard of."You have two kilometres of the waterfront of the Thames and we have got the capacity to get 15,000 homes built and a million square feet of other uses. "It would be a new neighbourhood for London, but the critical thing we need to make that happen is the arrival of excellent public transport - which is bringing the DLR over to Thamesmead." The government's target is to build 1.5 million new homes by if London can't deliver a large number of new homes, there is little chance the government will hit that number. To do that, it will mean transport infrastructure being funded to reach the undeveloped sites in Thamesmead and Beckton.
