The government has opened a call for evidence on the parental leave and pay system looking at how to modernise the existing statutory framework for parents.
The Labour Party promised an overhaul of employment protections to make them fit for the modern economy and to help working people thrive as part of its manifesto. However, when the Employment Rights Bill was published last year, anyone holding expectations of wider reform to family rights would have been sorely disappointed. In terms of reforming entitlement to family leave, the Bill's impact was limited to scrapping the length of service requirements for both paternity and parental leave and fixing a technical issue that resulted in employees losing their paternity leave entitlement if they took shared parental leave first. We wrote in detail about the impact of the Bill on family rights.
However, the Government's Next Steps to Make Work Pay document which was released alongside the Bill promised a "full" review of the parental leave system that would take place within the first year of government. Just in time to meet this deadline, a call for evidence opened on 1 July.
What will the review cover?
The review will consider all current types of family leave and the pay entitlements that accompany them. This includes:
- Maternity leave and pay
- Paternity leave and pay
- Adoption leave and pay
- Shared parental leave and pay
- Neonatal care leave and pay
- Parental bereavement leave and pay
- Maternity Allowance
- Unpaid parental leave
- Bereaved partner's paternity leave which is not yet in force (whilst the Act itself received royal assent last year, no regulations have been published to bring the new rights into force).
Any case for future reform will be considered against four objectives identified in the review. In summary these are maternal health during pregnancy and post-partum, economic growth though labour market participation and enabling continued participation, the best start in life for babies and young children, and childcare that works for all family situations.
There will also be focus on three "cross-cutting considerations": fairness and equality, cost (balancing costs and benefits), and social (shifting social and gender norms).
The call for evidence is fairly short asking for views on whether the current system supports the four objectives mentioned above, the priority order for the objectives and whether there are any additional objectives that should be included.
What reform can we expect?
It is reasonable to expect that this "landmark" review will lead to a comprehensive reform of the current parental leave system. The government has already said that it does not believe that the existing suite of entitlements supports working families effectively. The Women & Equalities Committee (the 'WEC') published a report last month focused on paternity and shared parental leave. They have also called for a "foundation for longer-term reform" and not a "tinkering around the edges of a broken system".
Notably, the government press release and subsequent Cabinet Ministers' social media posts all called out a statistic that one in three fathers don't take paternity leave because of the cost. The current paternity entitlement is two weeks of leave, paid at £187.18/week (or 90% of weekly earnings, whichever is lower). One of the key recommendations of the WEC was to increase paternity leave and pay to mirror maternity pay for the first six weeks (90% of average weekly earnings). In our experience, partners of birth parents do exercise various family leave rights when these are paid but take up is otherwise low. Increasing leave (or extending the ability for one partner to take leave without the other curtailing their own leave), without any pay reform, would not result in a material increase in the take-up of rights. However, if the burden of additional pay is imposed on employers, that is likely to be challenging in current economic conditions.
Likewise, the press release also explicitly calls out the need for fathers and partners to participate in parenting from day one. Again, this was a key theme identified in the WEC report which described the UK as having "one of the most gender unequal statutory parental leave systems in the developed world".
Shared parental leave also comes in for criticism on the basis of its complexity and difficulty to comprehend for the average parent and employer. Take up of this leave remains stubbornly low. The government's own evidence summary states that only one percent of all mothers, and four percent of fathers, took shared parental leave.
What next?
It is worth remembering that the right to take maternity leave was first established over 50 years ago and modern family dynamics are now very different. The government's evidence recognises changing societal expectations, citing research that showed the vast majority of parents (84% of mothers, 86% of fathers) agreed that men should take as much responsibility as women for the home and children. It is notable that this was even higher among those that took shared parental leave (94%).
Dissatisfaction with the current system has also been well documented and evidenced in many employers deciding to either enhance the current statutory entitlements (both in terms of pay and leave) or even stepping away from the rigidity of the statutory scheme altogether. For example, Lewis Silkin announced a New Parent policy which gives all new parents the ability to take 52 weeks leave and 26 weeks of full pay without the constraints of the shared parental leave system. The leave and pay can be taken in an unlimited number of discontinuous blocks within the first 12 months of the birth or adoption of a child and does not require the other parent to curtail (or limit) their leave. The question as to whether the government will be bold and move to a less gendered parental leave system or simply focus on increasing paternity leave and pay remains to be answered.
The call for evidence closes on 26 August 2025 and we can expect it will take some time to consider the responses, particularly if the government wants to explore a more radical break from the traditional statutory schemes. The review is expected to take 18 months, so we are unlikely to hear about any recommendations until early 2027.
The call for evidence can be downloaded here. Lewis Silkin will be responding to this call for evidence so please do get in touch if you would like to discuss.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
