Share the joy
12 March 2018
This article was featured in the April 2018 issue of the magazine.
Danny Done, managing director at Portfolio Payroll, says the government’s campaign aims to increase awareness of shared parental leave
Employers are advised to spend time familiarising themselves with the complexities of statutory shared parental leave (SShPL) and statutory shared parental pay (SShPP) due to a government announcement that it will increase efforts to promote its awareness amongst the public. Despite having been available to employees for almost three years, a study by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) estimates that only 2% of eligible individuals have chosen to take up the leave. The government’s Share the joy awareness campaign and supporting media coverage (https://goo.gl/nyaqpu) will likely mean more employers will have to face the challenges that come with this flexible family right.
Both SShPL and SShPP were originally introduced in April 2015 with the dual intention of enabling new mothers to return to their careers earlier whilst also allowing fathers an opportunity to take a greater share of the childcare. The law allows eligible mothers to convert their maternity leave into SShPL enabling her and her partner to share a maximum of fifty weeks of leave to care for their child. Parents are granted the flexibility to divide the allocated time up between themselves as they wish, albeit with some restrictions. Parents can alternate between spending time off work with the child together and having one parent spend time caring for the child alone whilst the other returns for a period of work.
SShPP is payable during SShPL at the rate of either £140.98 per week (set to rise to £145.18 in April 2018) or 90% of average earnings, whichever is lower. It is important to note that the SShPP does not cover the entirety of the leave period as parents are instead entitled to a maximum of 37 weeks’ paid leave. Therefore, in the event the full fifty weeks of SShPL is taken then thirteen of these weeks will have to be taken without SShPP under the statutory scheme.
...complexities surrounding the rules and eligibility criteria of SShPL...
It is thought that the main reason for the minimal participation in SShPL is simply the lack of knowledge and awareness of the scheme. The BEIS study found that half of the general public are unaware of their right to SShPL and SShPP. To address this the government is investing £1.5 million on a multi-layered advertising scheme which will involve placing adverts in commuter areas as well as an increased social media and internet presence. In the same vein, employers may wish to inform their own employees of the existence of SShPL to demonstrate their support of the scheme and their employees’ wellbeing.
The lack of understanding is arguably not helped by the complexities surrounding the rules and eligibility criteria of SShPL and it is likely that both employers and their employees struggle to interpret these. Different eligibility criteria apply for mothers and their partners. Some periods of leave that an employee requests must be granted, whereas others may be refused which then leads on to the option to withdraw the request and start again.
It is helpful for employers to invest time in understanding the system and creating a suite of documentation to assist both managers and employees to understand who qualifies to take leave, the information required to make a request and the process that then follows. A shared parental leave policy is an ideal way to achieve this but it should be supported with training of key members of staff who will be responsible for administering the system and making decisions over whether leave must be granted or not.
Addressing the issues surrounding SShPL and further promoting the scheme may well be successful in increasing awareness of the right. However, despite this, it does not tackle the traditional view that some mothers look forward to a year off work when they have had a baby and are not willing to give this up. This is often compounded by the fact that men tend, on the whole, to earn more than their partners and therefore couples may be more adversely affected from a financial perspective if the father were to take leave for a substantial amount of time during which he receives only SShPP.
As the government’s Share the joy awareness campaign looks set to pick up speed in the coming months employers would be wise to take a proactive approach to the SShPL scheme. Some employers may even choose to offer staff increased rates of SShPP in order to increase participation of the scheme. The employment appeal tribunal’s decision in Ali v Capita Customer Management is all the more important in light of this awareness scheme, because it will decide whether it is discriminatory to provide only SShPP to fathers who take shared parental leave when a mother on maternity leave would receive enhanced pay.