Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what proportion of men entitled to shared parental leave have taken such leave since its introduction.

The Government does not routinely collect data on the take up of Shared Parental Leave. However, we have started to evaluate the Shared Parental Leave and Pay schemes and, subject to the progress of data collection, we anticipate publishing findings in Spring 2019.

In the Impact Assessment published in 2013, the Government estimated that 285,000 working couples would be eligible for Shared Parental Leave in each year.

Based on information provided by employers to HM Revenue & Customs, Statutory Shared Parental Pay was claimed by the following numbers of individual male employees between April 2015 and January 2018:

Notes:

*Data collected for 2015-16 does not distinguish between claims for Statutory Shared Parental Pay and Additional Statutory Paternity Pay (its predecessor).

**Figure for 2017-2018 does not include data for February and March 2018.