Parental Pay
(asked on 20th April 2020) - View Source
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how many people started receiving (a) statutory paternity pay and (b) shared parental pay in each quarter since April 2015.
The Government is committed to supporting working parents. In 2015, we introduced Shared Parental Leave and Pay which gives eligible parents much more flexibility and choice in how they share care for their new child between them in the first year. The scheme is in addition to the Government’s 2-week Paternity Leave and Pay policy and gives fathers and partners access to up to 50 weeks of leave and 37 weeks of pay.
Take-up of Shared Parental Leave and Pay has been broadly in line with our initial estimates, which anticipated that a cultural change like this would take time to bed-in.
Table 1 below shows the number of individuals in receipt of Statutory Paternity Pay and Statutory Shared Parental Pay based on the month that the claim was first made.
Table 1: Individuals in receipt of Statutory Paternity Pay and Statutory Shared Parental Pay based on the month that the claim was first made by quarter, 2015/16 to 2019/20
| Statutory Paternity Pay (month first claimed) | Statutory Shared Parental Pay (month first claimed) |
Q1 15/16 | 51,900 | 1,200 |
Q2 15/16 | 55,000 | 1,400 |
Q3 15/16 | 52,200 | 1,500 |
Q4 15/16 | 54,200 | 1,900 |
Q1 16/17 | 55,100 | 2,000 |
Q2 16/17 | 56,200 | 2,000 |
Q3 16/17 | 52,900 | 1,700 |
Q4 16/17 | 54,000 | 2,000 |
Q1 17/18 | 51,400 | 2,100 |
Q2 17/18 | 55,500 | 2,200 |
Q3 17/18 | 52,600 | 1,900 |
Q4 17/18 | 51,200 | 1,900 |
Q1 18/19 | 48,300 | 2,300 |
Q2 18/19 | 50,300 | 2,600 |
Q3 18/19 | 47,600 | 2,200 |
Q4 18/19 | 54,000 | 2,400 |
Q1 19/20 | 50,800 | 2,900 |
Q2 19/20 | 53,100 | 3,500 |
Q3 19/20 | 50,400 | 2,400 |
- Data collected uses HMRC Real Time Information (RTI) and was extracted in March 2020. RTI is subject to revision or updates.
- Figures have been rounded to the nearest hundred.
- For the 2015-16 tax year, those receiving Additional Statutory Paternity Pay (ASPP) for children born before 6 April 2015 cannot be distinguished from those claiming ShPP within RTI data.
Data based on the month first claimed means that an individual who first claims statutory payment in a given month (i.e. had not claimed it in the previous month) and continues receiving statutory pay for multiple months would only be counted in the first month.