Draft Carer's Leave Regulations 2024 Draft Maternity Leave, Adoption Leave and Shared Parental Leave (Amendment) Regulations 2024

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Caroline Ansell

Wednesday 21st February 2024 General Committees

[Kevin Hollinrake]

It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Mr Hollobone. The Carer’s Leave Act 2023 and the Protection from Redundancy (Pregnancy and Family Leave) Act 2023 received Royal Assent on 24 May last year. These accompanying regulations were laid on 11 December 2023. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has played a role in taking these measures through Parliament. I thank in particular the promoters or sponsors of the private Members’ Bills that enable these regulations: the hon. Member for North East Fife, who is with us today, the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis), Lord Fox, Baroness Tyler and Baroness Bertin. The legislation that they helped to enact recognises the importance of unpaid carers and the significance of providing improved job security for pregnant women and new parents.

Statistics from the family resources survey 2021-22 showed that there were 4.9 million adult informal carers in the UK. Just over half of those are also holding down a job. That is about 2.5 million people trying to balance work with their caring responsibilities. According to research by the then Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, one in nine mothers reported that they had been dismissed, made compulsorily redundant where others had not been, or treated so poorly that they felt they had to leave work. If scaled up to the general population, that could mean that as many as 54,000 mothers a year are pushed out of the workforce. Although that data is from some time ago, we know that the problem persists. Put simply, that situation is unacceptable.

Delivering both these sets of regulations will fulfil our 2019 manifesto commitments to introduce one week of leave for unpaid carers and to introduce new protections for pregnant women and new parents. I will turn first to the carer’s leave regulations. Before getting into the substance, may I use this opportunity to flag a correction slip? The first line of regulation 5(1) on page 2 of the SI previously read “is entitled one week”, but now reads “is entitled to one week”.

Unpaid carers play a vital role in our society. There can be real challenges in balancing work with caring responsibilities. These regulations acknowledge some of those challenges and put in place measures that will help to ease the situation for a group of people who we know can be time-poor.

Carer’s leave will be a day one right for employees, who can then provide care, or make arrangements for the provision of care, for a dependant with a long-term care need. The definitions of care and care need have deliberately been kept wide to encompass a broad range of circumstances. Unpaid carers will be able to take their leave in a flexible manner, spanning from half a day to an entire week. That flexibility gives carers the most choice of how to manage their leave, based on their specific needs.

When applying for the leave, there will be no need to provide evidence indicating how the leave will be used or for whom. That will help to minimise any pressure on the carer, including any apprehension they might have about disclosing potentially sensitive third party information. It will also reduce the administrative burden for employers and eliminate red tape. Unpaid carers applying for the leave will have to provide advance notice, similar to the situation with the existing annual leave requirements, subject to a minimum notice period of three days.

Employers will not be able to deny the request for carer’s leave. However, they may postpone it. When doing so, they must let their employee know as soon as reasonably practicable and, following consultation, confirm a new date on which they can take the leave within a month of the original date. Lastly, on carer’s leave, safeguards will be in place, such as protection from dismissal or detriment as a result of having taken carer’s leave.

Turning to the draft Maternity Leave, Adoption Leave and Shared Parental Leave (Amendment) Regulations, as I said, it is not right that for a significant number of pregnant women and new parents, fearing losing their job unjustly is another worry they have to deal with. Under existing regulations—the Maternity and Parental Leave etc. Regulations 1999, often referred to as MAPL—before making an employee who is on maternity leave, adoption leave or shared parental leave redundant, employers have an obligation to offer them a suitable alternative vacancy where one is available, not just to invite them to apply for a role. In effect, that gives a parent taking one of those forms of leave priority over other employees, who are also at risk of redundancy. The point of these draft regulations is to extend that additional redundancy protection into pregnancy and for a period once the parent has returned to work.

[Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)]

To start, I am 100% behind all the important measures that the Minister has outlined. I was pleased to work with the hon. Member for North East Fife on the Bill Committee to bring forward carer’s leave. Is the Minister aware of the active consideration of, and some of the challenge around support for, kinship carers? A recent study shows that 50% of kinship carers have been forced to give up their work, and that there are 130,000 kinship placements. I support every measure that he is outlining, but will he reassure me that active consideration is being made for that important and significant group? The needs of children are well met by the support of their wider family, but it is generally in traumatic and difficult circumstances.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I thank my hon. Friend for her work. I, too, have kinship carers in my constituency. I know the important work they do and the saving they make to society, but also the help they give to children in such a situation. I am sympathetic. I have met the Minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing on a number of occasions, and I continue to do so. We are engaging to see what extra workplace entitlements we might make available to people in that situation, while trying to ensure that we do not add too many extra burdens to employers, in particular at this time when many face some difficulties. I thank my hon. Friend for her comments and am keen to continue to work with her on this particular area.

The provisions will help to alleviate some of the anxiety about job security that a pregnant woman or new parent may face. For the purposes of the draft maternity leave regulations, pregnancy is defined as the period from when a woman informs their employer of their pregnancy until two weeks after the pregnancy ends, for whatever reason. The additional redundancy protection continues for 18 months after the birth of the child, encompassing any period of relevant leave.

The 18-month period serves two purposes. First, it ensures that a mother returning from 12 months of maternity leave will receive six months of additional redundancy protection when she goes back to work. That meets the commitment that the Government made in their consultation response. Secondly, a single, consistent and clear period of protection is a simple way to accommodate the flexibility of shared parental leave and the interaction between shared parental leave and other types of parental leave. Creating a bespoke approach for those and other scenarios would have introduced considerable complexity into the regulations. That is why we opted for the simplicity and clarity of a single period of protection.

The period of protection for redundancy on return to work is activated immediately someone returns to the workplace following a period of maternity or adoption leave. However, the new draft regulations will introduce a minimum qualifying period for those taking shared parental leave alone—by “alone”, I mean that they have not previously taken a period of maternity or adoption leave. That is to avoid the situation where a parent who has taken just a few weeks of shared parental leave receives 18 months of additional protection in a redundancy situation. When we spoke with our stakeholders, they considered that it would be disproportionate to extend that level of protection to someone who had taken only a short period of shared parental leave. For that reason, the draft regulations require a parent to have taken a minimum period of six continuous weeks of shared parental leave—unless they have taken maternity or adoption leave—to activate the additional redundancy protection once they have returned to work.

Together, these measures will provide additional support and protection for pregnant women and new parents, and for those with caring responsibilities beyond childcare. The Government were pleased to support the Carer’s Leave Act 2023 and the Protection from Redundancy (Pregnancy and Family Leave) Act 2023, which were introduced as private Members’ Bills. We are pleased to have laid these regulations and look forward to their coming into force.