Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average payment was to people that 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 payment. 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 Table 4 of the Maternity Allowance quarterly statistics published here.

Table 1: Average weekly Maternity Allowance payments over 4 quarters

Statutory Maternity Pay is delivered through HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), rather than the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). There is no published data on the average payment for Statutory Maternity Pay.