Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average time was that people claimed (a) Maternity Allowance and (b) Statutory Maternity Pay in the last 12 months for which data is available.

Maternity Allowance data is published on a quarterly basis and includes data on average duration. The latest release is for June to August 2022. Maternity Allowance statistics for May 2022 was not published as planned due to a data production error. Thereby, data from the last 4 available quarters is reported in Table 1. This is taken from note 6 of the Maternity Allowance quarterly statistics published here.