New research released today has shown a fall in the already depressed uptake of shared parental leave in the UK, a scheme introduced in 2015 in a bid to bridge the gender pay gap.

Figures from law firm EMW show that just 11,200 couples applied to use shared parental leave during the 12 months to the end of March, down 17 per cent on the previous year. Using the 598,000 women who took maternity leave during the period as its baseline, EMW estimates that less than 2% of eligible couples are using shared leave.

The scheme, a flagship programme of the UK’s 2010 coalition government, has been repeatedly criticised for being overly-complex and failing to provide enough financial support. It has also come under fire for failing to cover all new fathers, with the TUC estimating that two out of five do not qualify.

A Government consultation on shared parental leave that was due to report in 2019 is to publish its findings “in due course”, according to a statement last year by Business Minister Paul Scully. The consultation gathered information from parents and employers on how parental entitlements are used in practice, with an eye to potential reforms that could cover levels of pay.

Jon Taylor, principal at EMW, noted that take-up of the scheme has fluctuated between 1% and 2% yearly since it was introduced.

"Very few couples believe that it provides enough money to justify using it,” he said.

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“As was the case for the last six years, seeing the pay of a new father cut to £150 per week remains unfeasible for many couples. This is exacerbated by the financial pressures new parents face when their child has just been born.”

As its currently operates, the scheme allows eligible parents to split up to 50 weeks of leave after the birth of their child, following the minimum of two weeks of maternity and paternity. This is broken down into 37 weeks of paid leave, and 13 additional weeks of unpaid leave.

Parents who earn less than £120 per week, or who haven’t been continuously employed for a minimum of 26 weeks, are not eligible for shared leave.

This directly impacts couples from lower-income families, those on zero-hours contracts and the self-employed. It is estimated there were more than a million zero-hours contracts active in 2020, while 811,000 people across the UK were self-employed.

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One of the aims of shared parental leave is to eradicate the “motherhood penalty”, where women’s careers and pay take a dive after having children, by trying to establish a workplace norm in which both parents take time off for childcare. However, with men often earning larger salaries, many couples find it financially unviable to slash the income of their largest breadwinner down to the statutory minimum of £152 per week.

“Increasing the amount offered to new parents under the scheme would assist new mothers, who are often the ones to take most of the childcare responsibilities,” Mr Taylor said. “Shared parental leave could more equally share out these responsibilities and reduce the impact of maternity leave on a woman’s career.”

Many employers provide leave pay above the statutory minimum but there are substantial variations in how much is on offer, and to whom.

The recent Parental Leave Benchmark produced by nursery care provider Bright Horizons found that 79% of organisations offer some form of enhanced leave pay for parents, though when it comes to paternity pay, this falls to 67%. The number offering enhanced pay for shared parental leave has almost doubled in the last four years, but still stands at just 48%.

Another report published earlier this year by EMW found that take-up of paternity leave in the UK has fallen to its lowest level in 10 years to just 27% of all eligible fathers. Once again looking at the 12 months to the end of March, 170,000 men took paternity leave compared to 650,000 women taking maternity leave.

According to a December 2020 survey by the Chartered Institute of Professional Development (CIPD), 73% of working fathers feel there remains a stigma attached to taking extended paternity leave, with nearly all saying that workplace culture needs transformed to normalise men taking time off.