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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, when the fieldwork and other research that will form the basis for the Government’s evaluation of the Shared Parental Leave scheme was (a) initiated and (b) completed.

Work on the evaluation of the Shared Parental Leave and Pay scheme started in July 2018 and has included commissioning and interrogating information collected through large scale, representative, surveys of employers and parents and a qualitative study of parents who have used the scheme. The various data sources will help us to better understand the barriers and enablers to parents taking Shared Parental Leave.

Fieldwork was completed in February 2020 and we are currently processing the data. Analysis of this data has taken longer than expected due to the impact of Covid-19 on our research partners and because we have necessarily prioritised work on supporting parents during the pandemic. However, the evaluation of the Shared Parental Leave and Pay scheme remains important for the Government, and we will publish our findings in due course.