No one could have missed the publicity this week given to the surprisingly low take up of Shared Parental Leave one year on from its introduction.
In 2013 Nick Clegg made the following statement about the introduction of ShPL - ‘We want working parents to have more flexibility in how they arrange their time off and their work in a way that makes sense for their family in the year after the birth or adoption of a child’.
So, what went wrong?
I believe there are several potential answers to this question:
The rules concerning ShPL are immensely complex, so much so that Daniel Barnett has described the legislation as the yukkiest, horriblest piece of employment legislation that he has come across Many women are reluctant to give up their 52 weeks of maternity leave. On one course I ran there were three women who were pregnant and two of them had told their partners not to go down that route when they raised the subject of shared leave.I have come across a couple of employers who reported that the mother curtailed her maternity leave at the end of the compulsory maternity leave and their partners then took the rest of the leave as ShPL. Sadly, finances all too often are a deciding factor and all too infrequently is the mother the higher earner.
This is not helped with the maximum statutory shared parental pay being set at the standard weekly rate of £139.58. A government report suggested that just under 300,000 working fathers would be eligible to take the leave, but they estimated that take up would only be 2% to 8%.
Even so, these figures would mean take up would be somewhere between 6,000 and 24,000. Compare this with Scandinavian countries where the take up is 90% but shared parental pay is in excess of 80% of earnings.
This must beg a question of the government – how serious are they about employees sharing the leave? And, surely they cannot be so naïve to think that employees will be encouraged by £139.58 per week?
