Good afternoon and welcome to the Women and Equalities Committee. Today we are here holding our first evidence session on “Equality at work: paternity and shared parental leave”. First, we will hear from Joeli Brearley, founder and director of Pregnant Then Screwed; Karla Capstick, director at A Better Start Nottingham and the National Children’s Bureau; Imanuel Ben Israel, dad and programme participant from A Better Start; and Alex Lloyd Hunter, co-founder of The Dad Shift. Welcome, everybody, and thank you so much for being here. We are going to get straight into it, and I am going to hand over to Samantha.

First, I apologise for my voice, it is disgusting. It will be just loud enough that I do not squeak. Welcome, and thank you; it is very nice to see you here today. I am going to come to Alex first, if I may. Can you tell us a little about what motivated you to launch The Dad Shift?

Sure. For me, this came out of my experience with my own dad. Obviously, back in his day there was no paternity leave at all. My older brother was born 9 pm on a Sunday, and my dad was back at work 12 hours later, at 9 am the next day. He worked long hours; we did not really see him five days a week. As a result, he was not really involved in looking after us, and we never bonded with him in the same way we did with my mum. Ultimately, that distance between him and the rest of the family unit contributed to the breakdown of his marriage. We are much closer as adults. I have a three-year-old son, and to my surprise in many ways, he has become a very soppy, devoted grandparent. That has given us a frame to talk about his experience as a dad, and he deeply feels like he missed out. He said this thing to me that really sticks with me, which is, “I just didn’t know there was a different way of doing it. There just wasn’t an alternative.” Even though our attitudes have changed a lot since then, a lot of the structures in place that make it hard for dads to be a bigger part of their kids’ lives have not changed that much. His experience is still the experience of too many men. That is bad for men themselves and for their kids, who miss out on that relationship with their fathers, and of course, for women, who end up shouldering the burden of childcare alone in many cases. The more I started looking into this and reading about the work that organisations like Pregnant Then Screwed have been doing—which has been brilliant—the more I realised that we need more dads to be out here calling for this, because it is something that we want and care about and that will benefit us. It did not sit right that we were leaving it to mums to fight for this on our behalf. For me, that is why this came out.

Excellent. How many men have signed up to your campaign?

So far around 16,000 people have signed up. We do not know exactly how many are dads, because we do not always collect that data, but several thousand of them are.

Would you say there is evidence of a cultural shift in appetite for shared parental leave?

Definitely, yes. The evidence we see is that there is almost universal support among not just dads but the public as a whole for the idea that dads should be more involved in their kids’ lives. We have poll results that show that 90% of fathers agree that, these days, fathers want to be more involved with their kids and 86% of people agree that it is better when both parents have equal opportunities to be involved in childcare, rather than just one parent shouldering it alone. Importantly, you sometimes come up against this reflexive assumption that this is a woke issue, which only middle-class dads in cities care about, but all the evidence we see shows that this is something people across the country care about, whatever jobs they do, however much they earn, whatever their political affiliation. Fundamentally, this is an issue about how we as a country support working families and whether we do that properly or not. As an example of that, I recently met a self-employed tradesman called Tom, whose kids were both born premature, and his wife had emergency C-sections both times. He did the right thing: he stepped up and took six weeks off unpaid—as he is self-employed, he received no paternity pay at all—to look after his babies and his partner. He says that six years later, he has still not recovered financially. The financial stress that has put on them as a family has destroyed his and his wife’s mental health, and it drove him to the point where he attempted suicide. That is what this issue means to a lot of families across the country. It is something that affects everyone, and all the evidence we see is that everyone in the country wants this to happen.

On a personal note, my daughter is now 17, and I was very fortunate. I am no longer with her dad, but he was very hands-on. Her relationship with her dad is wonderful; it has enabled me to pursue a career, and she now has different role models in us both. I feel like you are preaching to the converted here. That naturally brings me on to another question. I will turn to you, Karla, if I may. The NCB submission says that gender-equal parenting contributes to a multitude of positive outcomes. Can you describe some key benefits for children and families?

Yes. A Better Start’s sites were set up to predominantly focus on pregnancy and early child development outcomes. We were very focused on improving outcomes in babies and children around speech and language, diet and nutrition, and social and emotional, and trying to bring about long-lasting systems change. One of the areas that all five A Better Start sites—Blackpool, Lambeth, Southend, Nottingham and Bradford—are focused on is how we make our services more inclusive and accessible for all. We have very much a progressive, universal approach, so these services have been open to everybody, but we have recognised through the work that we have done that fathers—not deliberately—have been an excluded group. If you think about maternity and post-natal services, they are predominantly aimed at women. I appreciate and understand why that is, but as Alex has just highlighted, society has changed now. Fathers want to step into that space and play a more active co-parenting role in supporting the upbringing of their children, and yet we do not have structures and services that are able to support them in that way. Regarding the wider benefits we have seen, if you have the ability to support fathers in playing that more active role through things like parental leave reforms, greater understanding by employers and so on, then it really is a triple win in terms of policy. Not only do we then start addressing some of the gender stereotypes that Alex has touched on and start thinking about how we start shifting the gender pay gap and structural inequalities that exist for women, but we start shifting the narrative around men to one in which they want to be actively involved, equal co-parents. This has positive impacts for them as well: positive impacts on their mental health and on their relationship with their children, whether they are with the mother or not, which can still be a real benefit. Equally, it has hugely important positive impacts on their children. Just as you have described, regardless of family make-up, having both parents actively involved really helps to improve those child development outcomes as well. Not only can it support women, lifting them up in terms of not having all that unpaid care responsibility sitting with them, but it lifts men up too, and it can ultimately support children’s development outcomes longer down the line. I do not know if you want to add anything from your perspective around that, Imanuel, as to why you think it is important.

I would only say that the outcome for the children is definitely the main thing to look at. Society, in general, seems to think that fathers do not really care about the children and that we are more about getting money and going to work and things, but these things affect fathers emotionally, physically and mentally. It is good for men to have that time away. Having a new child is something that really affects everybody in the family, and these men sometimes want to recover; they want to have that time with their children. Not having leave is detrimental to mental health and things like that, which have been mentioned already, but having leave is also a benefit to the entire family. Yes, I agree with everything that has been said.

I have one last question. Should the Government consider wider support for dads alongside or within their review of parental leave, and if so, which aspects of support are key?

Absolutely yes. Parental leave reform is absolutely crucial and really important, yes, but if we look at it through that inclusive whole-family lens, better support for involved fathers has positive outcomes for women, as well as for their babies and children, as I have said. Some other things I would certainly advocate for across the five A Better Start sites are things like better maternal and paternal mental health provision. Fathers and partners are also quite likely to develop mental health challenges during this time, especially if there has been a traumatic birth, for example. They may have watched their partner have to go through a C-section or a potentially life-threatening situation, and that has a big impact on them as well. Blackpool’s A Better Start site has actually set up a local dads’ group, which has been very much focused on improving their physical, emotional and social mental health and which provides that brotherhood of support for men. It has been very much driven by men and led by them. As I touched on, we have also found through our work in A Better Start that there is more work to be done around making existing universal services far more inclusive for fathers, male carers and parents. Supporting fathers supports mothers and/or partners and women through that whole-family approach. I know this is about women and equalities, but we have seen that it is also a real key opportunity to get to men, because this is a real golden moment in their lives. It is a key teachable moment. It is a point in time when a lot of men are really open to having extra support, and they are thinking about their own health—stopping smoking, improving their diet, exercising more—because they want to be the best version of themselves for their children and their families. We did a survey in Nottingham of just over 70 dads, and 80% said they would welcome more support in that antenatal period, in the first 1,001 days. It was really crucial for them because they wanted to be a positive partner and to know how to support their partner going through pregnancy and after the birth, and they wanted to be a positive influence for their children. We need to do more research in this area. There is not as much research around fathers’ mental health and how it affects men. There is also a lot more that we can do to make services more inclusive and accessible in that time period, alongside the parental leave reforms, which are obviously significant.

I have nothing to add. You have summed that up beautifully, Karla.

Before I hand over to Rachel, Karla, you talked about making services more inclusive. Could you explain what that would look like in black and white, please?

Yes, absolutely. We have some really good examples of what we have done across the five A Better Start sites, in particular around how we improve our access and acceptability for families. We have had a real focus on fathers in the A Better Start sites, as I said, but also on under-served communities: black, Asian, minority, ethnic and migrant populations and people who might have no recourse to public funds. The key ingredients we have discovered through the five A Better Start sites’ learning are about how we maybe engage better with those under-served and under-represented groups. This will not come as a great surprise, but relationships are absolutely key—the relationships you may have with your health professional and/or your care professional at that time. It is important you feel that services are trusted, that they are going to take the time to listen to you, that they are going to even acknowledge that you are in the room—for fathers, potentially—and that they can then help reduce some stigma, potentially fear, or just the feeling of being judged as to why you are there and asking for help and support. As I said, Blackpool has developed the football therapy sessions, and Bradford has done things around woodworking. It is really important that if we want to make services more inclusive, we involve the people we are providing the services for in the design of those services. We have done a lot of work around co-producing the services in A Better Start. It has been a core principle of the work that we have done. That means working with either dads or those excluded marginalised groups to say, “What works for you? Where do you want your service to be? Who do you want to deliver your service? What time should the service be? What kind of environment? What does it look like for you?” Getting that first-hand, lived experience to help shape a service will make it more accessible and acceptable. We have seen that across all five A Better Start sites. As professionals working with families, we need to really think about what our barriers are. We often talk about people being hard to reach or hard to engage. I would actually flip that on its head and just say, “We’re not doing a very good job of engaging with them in the first place.” Some things that have worked across A Better Start sites have been thinking—especially for people with English as an additional language—about whether we are translating effectively. Are we doing it well? Are we thinking about the use of interpreters? Are our services culturally competent and sensitive? Are they trauma-informed? Do we work through and with trusted voluntary sector community organisations, which is where that community might have more trust? Another key part for us has been trying to think about how we have a more diverse and representative workforce, especially if we are thinking about engaging with dads and/or black or Asian minority ethnic groups, whether that be males or females. Having a workforce that better represents the people it is working with has absolutely paid dividends. I have an example of that in Nottingham, with the family mentor service, where we deliberately recruited from the community. In one area of the city, we had a service that was staffed with a paid peer workforce. They spoke 15 different languages and closely matched the demographic of the city. In Blackpool and in other areas, they have looked at male workers for dads’ services. Not everyone wants that, but in some areas they have said, “Yes, that is what we want. We want a man leading the service.” Crucially, we need to improve the data we collect on some groups, particularly around fathers and marginalised groups. Lambeth has done some excellent work around that noting of ethnic minority status as “other” and therefore not really understanding what that means. It has done a deep dive into that and really looked at what we mean by that. What actually is the ethnic origin of that family? How does that play out into how they will receive or accept services? What more do we need to do to understand? There is still a lot of additional work that we can do around making things more inclusive.

Thank you. Imanuel, you have used the A Better Start sites, right?

Yes.

What did you like about them?

I accessed it through a group named Shifting Your Mindset, which does a dads’ group that meets regularly. That is how I was introduced to that group, and I learned more widely about what was behind it from there. I am getting on a little now and growing up and being a father. I never felt there was anywhere I could express certain things I was going through. These were things I thought were very unique to me, which I later found out are not unique to me at all; they are quite common. There are a lot of men who feel isolated and like they are going through things, and even their next-door neighbour might be going through the same thing, but nobody is talking. Having a place a safe space to talk is brilliant. You know you are not alone. There are situations like the one mentioned earlier, and I do not know the situation you spoke about in full, but if that man had had more people to talk to and access to services, it would likely have helped. When my older children were quite young, I was going through what I would now call postpartum depression, but when I mentioned that, I was laughed at because the idea was that men cannot go through that. Now it is acceptable that they can, but at the time I said it to only one person and I was laughed at, and I did not mention it again. Just to tag on to what was said in the last question in terms of services, there are quite rightly maternity services where women are checked on when the children are young. As part of that, it would be good to also ask, “How is the father? Are you okay?” if he is in the house, or even if not, just to find out, because sometimes a young father might need some direction and some help. These are the kinds of things we talk about. As a group, we support each other with our own experiences, and at least there is somewhere we can go. But it would be great if there was a wider network and resources to tap into, so that we could direct people and say, “Actually, you can go to this place, and you can talk about that and get support for it.” I do not know if that answers your question.

Joeli, I know you have not come in yet, so I will direct this question to you, but it is fine if other people then feel they want to come in. Should the Government’s objective be to include all working parents in the parental leave system, regardless of their employment status and income?

Yes, all parents should have access to some form of parental leave, no matter how they become a parent. The principles on which parental leave policy should be developed are, first, that all parents have access to some form of paid parental leave so that they are enabled to take time off and spend quality time with their child. We know that if they are enabled to do that, that reduces the infant mortality rate, as well as having lots of benefits for the mental health of parents and for the health of the baby. We would also want to see that the birthing parent has additional time off, because of course they are giving birth, and they can of course have birth trauma, and all sorts of stuff can happen while giving birth. Special consideration should be given to single parents and parents who have multiple births. One simple thing that the Government can do is encourage companies to publish their parental leave policies, which will give parents more choice and information about employers they want to work for.

Do you think there are currently excluded groups that need to be considered in the Government’s review?

Yes, definitely. Self-employed people are a major group. They have exactly the same needs around the time that a child is born as people who are employed, but many cannot afford to take any leave at all. We did some work with a group called On The Tools, which polled tradespeople and found that a third did not take a single day of leave when their child was born, because they just could not afford it. Some 50% of them said they felt unsafe back at work using big power tools and doing dangerous work on no sleep. Self-employed dads pay in £1.1 billion in national insurance contributions a year. That dwarfs what the Government spend on paternity leave, but they get no access to it themselves. So, self-employed parents are one crucial group. Joeli is absolutely right about single parents. In other countries, it is common for single parents to get the paternity leave allowance as well as a maternity leave allowance, or to transfer it to a friend or family member. Finally, there are kinship carers—grandparents, for example—who might take on guardianship of their grandchildren, who in effect take on many of the responsibilities of an adoptive parent but get none of the access to leave or support that adoptive parents do. They should be included as well.

Can I add to that? There are also those on zero-hours contracts and students who are excluded. We have talked about self-employed dads, but we should also talk about self-employed mums, who do not get that first six weeks at 90% of their salary; they go straight to £182 a week, which is not enough money to live on. The Resolution Foundation did some research and found that self-employed mothers took around three to six weeks off after childbirth, compared to nine to 12 months taken by employed mothers. We hear from self-employed mothers all the time that they just are not able to stop working, yet they are told if they have a C-section they should be resting for six weeks. It is causing massive problems for mothers as well. We are actually really rare in not having an offer for self-employed dads. If you look at the 27 EU countries, there are only three—plus us—that do not offer paid leave for self-employed dads. The others are Greece, Cyprus and the Netherlands. That was researched by the Campaign for Parental Pay Equality.

Karla, to what extent do you think low take-up rates of parental leave by dads, particularly in groups like working-class dads and some minority ethnic groups, are driven by cultural factors?

It definitely plays a part, as I touched on in that previous question, because people are not aware of what is available, they do not feel it is for them and they are not able to access it. Affordability is without a doubt one of the largest reasons why people are not taking up what is available and on offer to them. For families who are living in poverty, as Joeli and Alex have touched on, your employment status—whether you are on zero hours, are self-employed or are working part time—and that perpetuation around the gender stereotypes that we sadly still see in some parts of society will have an impact on that. As I mentioned, making sure that families, parents, dads and particularly some ethnic minority groups are aware of what is available will help to increase take-up. That is where the A Better Start learning that I have mentioned around relationships is key; co-producing with fathers and groups looking to actively remove those barriers will really support the improvement of take-up. That is what we have certainly seen in the nine or 10 years of A Better Start when we actively seek to work with groups that are under-represented and under-served. I would say that the same principles could therefore apply to parental leave. If we ask more questions of people who are on part-time, zero-hours contracts or who are self-employed, such as, “What would work for you?”, we are more likely to get a fairer, better system that works for all.

Can you tell us about some of the work you have done specifically to break down cultural barriers?

Some of the work we have done has included things like specific groups that have been aimed at particular communities. As I said, there is the work around translation. In Nottingham, I can give an example where we have a front-facing website that is for families to access. We made sure we translated that website into the five core key languages that are spoken in the city, and we made sure not to just use Google Translate. We actually had it done really well. For Arabic languages, it flipped the entire site so they read right to left; everything was thought about. When we are delivering services, we focus on the fact that we use a lot of metaphors in the English language; it is quite a common thing. I am horrendously terrible at constantly using metaphors and then suddenly thinking about it. We use a lot of them in child development when we talk about babies’ brains and how they develop. Metaphors can just not land with someone who does not have English as an additional language; culturally, they do not quite know what that means or why you would use that metaphor to describe something. We have been really mindful of that. As Imanuel has talked about, another thing is developing services that have been run by voluntary community groups that understand that community really well. They are already trusted, they are working there, and they know and understand what the community needs and how we can support them. That has been really key as well. It is about not just using your statutory services, although they are really important—your health visitors, maternity, family support workers and so on—but really looking at what else is available, what the strengths and assets are within that community, and who those people trust. We have also learned a lot around breaking down some engagement barriers there.

Can I just add to that a little bit? In terms of another reason why there might be a lack of uptake, we could look at the model. When we think about paternity leave, there is a reason why it is the way it is. If I was giving birth, obviously, it is very physically stressful to the body, and rest is needed; the child needs to be suckled and all that, and then there is weaning. A good amount of time is needed—a solid time for the mother to bond with the child and feed the child. If we were to look at paternity leave, it might not be needed for the exact same reasons. It will be needed for the father to bond with the child, support the mother and empathise. It could be that, instead of taking a solid so many weeks off, he could take one or two days a week off and just have that time with the family and still be able to work. For some guys, their identity is very much in work. They think about getting paid, obviously, and the whole camaraderie around work. A bit of both might help guys to think, “Okay, yes, I will take that time off to be with the family and still be able to have my work routine.” That is just a thought of how we could look at it.

Alex, do you have any data on the background of men and dads who are supporting your campaign for improved paternity leave?

Yes. We have a big survey that thousands of parents have filled in, and we see people from every background. We have a lot of teachers, people who work in business, people who work in the charity sector, tradespeople, plumbers, builders. We have all sorts of careers and backgrounds, and the people are spread across the country. One thing I would like to add on the question around the barriers to uptake is that it is hard to overstate how big a barrier pay is. If you look at Spain, it is a really instructive example of this. Seven or eight years ago, its paternity leave was almost as bad as ours: it had two weeks. It has gone through a phased process of increasing it by a couple of weeks at a time for a few years. Now you get 16 weeks at 100% pay. One hundred per cent pay is crucial, because what they found is that the uptake rate across people across all different industries is incredibly high. It is 15 to 16 weeks on average, whether you work in manufacturing, business, finance, science or agriculture. It is pretty universal. That speaks to the fact that if people have to pay to get that time, it creates a barrier that a lot of people are unwilling to cross, or a lot of people just cannot cross. At the moment, if you are on an average salary, it costs over £1,000 to take your two weeks of paternity leave. That is an amount of money that a lot of people just cannot afford.

Do you think there is an appetite for change across all the range of occupational income groups?

Yes, definitely. Going back to the polling I spoke of earlier, we have support across all sorts of income brackets. In fact, you often see that support is highest among people in the lowest income brackets for getting that opportunity to be more actively involved in their family. You are as likely to agree with that whether you are a Labour voter, a Reform voter or a Conservative voter. It is pretty universal.

We did polling that found very similar outcomes to Alex’s polling. So we have two polls saying the same thing. We also did some research, which found that half of dads and second parents who do not take the full allocation of paternity leave said the reason was financial hardship. Men tend to take two weeks until they tip over a household income of £150,000, and then they can take up to nine weeks, but before £150,000, they take two weeks or less. The other barrier is employment. We know that men often are pressured to come back to work before those two weeks are up. We found that 17% of dads said their employer was putting pressure on them to return early, which is why they did. An additional 13% said they were worried they would not get the promotion they were hoping for if they did not go back earlier than the two weeks. I would say money, culture and employment are the issues.

Can we come back to you, Alex? You do not think there is anything to this idea that is being putting forward that parental leave is somehow just playing into a woke agenda?

No, not at all. There is widespread support for it. Our attitudes have changed; our problem is that our systems and policies have not. We are decades behind other countries on this.

It is really, really nice to see you all here; thank you so much for coming to share some insights. I am an active supporter of the Pregnant Then Screwed campaign, so I am really pleased to see you here, Joeli, and I am actively involved in The Dad Shift campaign. I must also declare that I am an officer of the women and work APPG and the women’s health APPG. Now that I have that out of the way, Alex and Joeli, you are both calling for a longer period of statutory paternity leave. In your view, what length of paternity leave would be feasible right now?

Six weeks at 90% of salary—it has to be a high percentage of salary—is the absolute minimum that we should be offering dads and second parents, and it is absolutely feasible for us to offer that. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation looked at the cost, and it estimated that it would be £1.73 billion, based on a 70% take-up rate. I do not expect the take-up rate to be that high immediately. It would take about five years to get there. It also said that it would have an economic benefit of £2.6 billion. I know that you are speaking to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation next, so I am sure it will share all that research with you. Look, it is time we asked ourselves a fundamental question about what sort of society we want this to be. Do we want to continue to perpetuate outdated and harmful gender stereotypes that tell us that women do the nurturing, the caring and the child-rearing and are the homemakers, whereas men just need to pull their socks up and get back to work, and they are the strong, stoic breadwinners and do not need this time to nurture and care for their family? The mental health of men in this country is in crisis. Boys are saying that they feel lost and disconnected, and it is no wonder when our laws are literally telling them, “You don’t need time to nurture and to connect with your family.” Bronnie Ware, the palliative care nurse, wrote a book about her experience of caring for the dying, and she said that every man on his deathbed said, “I wish I had spent more time with my children and I had worked less.” These are not just words; these are the wishes of men on their deathbed, and we are still not listening. It is absolutely imperative that if we care about the wellbeing of women, men, parents and children, we make a change. We have companies that are trying desperately to bridge that gap, but it is affecting only a small group of men. The only way that change is going to happen is if this Government do something, and they increase paternity leave, ring-fence it and pay it at a decent percentage of salary.

Alex, do you want to add anything?

That is bang on. Six weeks at 90% would be transformative from where we are now, but it is the bare minimum. It would still put us in the bottom third in Europe. It should not be the end point, but it would make a huge difference.

Do you see that as a first step towards more equal parental leave for fathers and other parents?

That should be the goal, yes. If you look at countries that are doing this really well, an example that is spoken about a lot is Sweden. It has this combination of ring-fenced leave for both parents—again, properly paid—so each parent gets 90 days, and then on top of that, they can share 300 days between them. It is really important that you have that ring-fenced element. It is not just, “Shared parental leave for all. Work it out yourselves.” That has been tried in the past and it does not work. What you see time and again is that dads will sacrifice that leave so the mothers can take it all. What you need is the ring-fenced leave and then building shared parental leave on top of that. That would be an ideal end situation. Sweden has been at this for 50 years, and we are not assuming we are going to get to that overnight. What we really need to start with is better, longer-paid paternity leave. That has to be the priority, not tweaking shared parental leave, which has fundamentally failed as a policy. We did some research in December, on the 10th anniversary of shared parental leave. Less than 2% of people are taking it, and the uptake is vastly unequal. It is essentially only accessible to the very wealthiest people. Some 60% of people who take it are in the top 20% of incomes. More people take it in London than in Scotland, Wales, the north-east, the north-west and Northern Ireland combined. The problems are that it is not well enough paid and that because dads do not have their own decent paternity leave allowance, they are reluctant to take that away from mothers. If we try to tweak that, we are not going to get anywhere. We have to start with better paternity leave.

Yes, that has to be the basic starting point, doesn’t it?

That is right, yes.

Joeli, your mission is to tackle pregnancy and maternity discrimination, and rightly so. To what extent could a reformed parental leave system work towards this end?

Pregnancy and maternity discrimination exists because employers have this intrinsic bias towards women. This is well documented; I am not just saying this. We see women as distracted and less committed to their jobs from the point they get pregnant. We see them as a burden to business because they are going to take time off to look after that baby. If we make parental leave gender neutral so that dads are taking longer periods of time out of work, then that bias will also shift towards men. Of course, as an employer, you cannot have a bias towards everybody who is your potential employee. So, it will change things, absolutely, and it will reduce pregnancy and maternity discrimination. When you look at countries that have better paternity leave systems, where dads are taking longer periods of time out of work, you have much lower rates of pregnancy and maternity discrimination. It will also have a positive impact on the mental health of mums, and that is crucial here because lots of women return to work after having a baby and they still have quite severe post-natal depression. They are not ready to return to work. It is really well documented that if dads and second parents are enabled to take time out to spend time with the whole family, the mental health of women improves dramatically. We know that this will reduce the motherhood penalty. Our research with the Centre for Progressive Policy found that countries that have at least six weeks’ paternity leave paid at 90% of salary have a 4% smaller gender pay gap and a 3.7% smaller labour force participation gap, so you get more women in work, and they progress much faster as a result.

That is great. Do you think extending total leave would require more focus on tackling parental discrimination affecting men, and would you support better legal protections for men, alongside a reform in the parental leave system?

Yes, absolutely. We know that if men ask to take shared parental leave, they also can encounter bias and discrimination. As a result, we have heard some shocking stories from men of employers saying, “Shall I buy you a dress while you’re at it?” or writing emails to them entitled, “Hello, Nanny”—all sorts of awful, gendered messages to men. Obviously, the law changed in April, so there is extended protection from redundancy when you are pregnant and when you return from parental leave, but that works for men only if they are taking shared parental leave. If we are extending paternity, we would also need to change the law so that when they return they are not discriminated against.

I completely agree with that. We should extend that protection to paternity leave as well. We have heard quite a surprisingly high number of stories from dads who have applied for paternity leave, and then HR has gone silent for a few weeks, and then they have lost their jobs. I heard from someone who lost a job on his third day of paternity leave, while his child was lying on his chest, and his heart rate went up so much that it woke up his child. It has been devastating for him and his family. The scale of it is not the same as mothers face, but it is there. We absolutely need better protection from discrimination and dismissal for men and other non-birthing parents taking paternity leave.

I would absolutely agree. I have obviously talked about some of what I would consider to be the great work that the A Better Start sites have done, because we have had that fabulous opportunity through the lottery grant to really test and learn new things. However, as Alex and Joeli have highlighted in the first instance, we have made great strides forward in terms of access, accessibility and breaking down barriers, but this issue is still there—it is still a real thing. It is interesting to talk about employers. Equally—again, this is not necessarily a deliberate thing—we have seen quite a lot of fathers facing bias from people who work in those services that are there. For example, we have run a fabulous project in Nottingham, but it has been really hard work in terms of a culture shift around midwifery, 0 to 19 and our health visitors. We looked at how we could improve making things more father-inclusive and partner-inclusive in the maternity space, and we agreed to fund 144 recliner chairs across our hospital trust’s two sites in Nottingham city. At the time of us proposing that, fully funded by the A Better Start grant, only 7% of the workforce were supportive. They came up with a huge range of reasons, mainly linked to safeguarding and other things like that, with negative connotations around fathers, as to why that was not a good idea. Some 70% of women and pregnant people were in favour. We decided to press ahead with that. After we had been running it for just over a year, 85% of women and pregnant people who used it with their partners, said that they felt better supported during pregnancy because their partner was with them. There was a huge shift. Women were already saying, “We want this,” the workforce was going, “Oh, we can’t do that,” and then actually it was a huge success, and it really changed hearts and minds—I need to stress that—of colleagues in maternity in Nottingham. They had a huge shift to the point where the integrated care board locally also funded the roll-out across the other hospital trust up in Mansfield and Sherwood. There is a lot to do as well with workforce that support in pregnancy, alongside employers.

Thank you all for coming. I just have a quick supplementary question to Kirith’s excellent questions. It is really great to meet you, Joeli; I am a big fan of your work. I used to be CEO of Women’s Equality Network Wales, and we often quoted your research, so thank you very much. To me, the end goal needs to be completely equalised parental leave. Am I right? I would just like you—probably Joeli—to talk a little about that. It needs to not be shared; it needs to be exactly the same rights for men and women, or two parents, because otherwise we are going to continue with gender inequality and the gender pay gap.

You would also need to add on a period of time for women giving birth because, of course, it can be quite an ordeal, but yes, besides that, you equalise parental leave. The key thing is ring-fencing it, having it on a use-it-or-lose-it basis and paying a decent percentage of salary. Yes, of course we would love to be in the position that Sweden is in, or any of the Nordic countries; we just appreciate that it is going to take a little time to get there.

We take the steps now to get to that in the end. Thank you; that was the only question.

Sure. Some Scandinavian countries started with shared parental leave as an option. Norway, for example, introduced it back in the ‘70s and gave dads the right to take shared parental leave in 1978, I think it was. By 1993, only 3% of men were taking any parental leave at all. That is because you come up against those cultural barriers that say, “This is really time for mothers; it’s not something that fathers do.” Those practical and cultural barriers feed into each other, so no one is taking the leave, and the culture does not change. They then introduced ring-fenced paternity leave. They were the first country in the world to do the “Daddy quota,” as they called it, and overnight the figure went from 3% to 30%. Within seven years, it was at 70%, and today it is 95%. You see time and again from other countries that the leap has been made in men taking leave, and subsequently the leap has been made in attitudes around parenting roles: men taking on a bigger role in childcare, and the shift towards gender equality that we want to see, comes after proper, well-paid, ring-fenced leave for dads, and not from shared parental leave as a starting point.

It would help. The challenge you are going to find is that statutory pay is so low at the moment that if you increased it to a level that made this accessible for the vast majority of people, you would end up in situations where some people could take 33 weeks of shared parental leave at 100% pay on Government statutory rates, which creates its own problems. So it could do, but it is quite a badly designed system. Joeli is far more of an expert on this than I am, but we are unusual in having a very long maternity leave that is very poorly paid, and a very short paternity leave that is also very poorly paid. We have dug ourselves into a bit of a hole that makes it quite hard to tweak shared parental leave to make it work in that context. It might help, but really it feels like a red herring. There is a much simpler, proven, easier-to-implement solution, which is improving paternity leave.

Yes, that is the case. For example, one of the stories that we submitted was from a guy called Andrew who said that he was really pumped to be super-active when his child was born. They planned to take shared parental leave, and then they sat down and did the numbers and said, “Well, this is going to cost us thousands of pounds.” That is possibly both because he earned more than his partner, but also because enhanced maternity leave is still much more common than enhanced paternity leave. The main issue there was that his partner would lose her enhanced maternity leave if he took shared parental leave—she would not get the full pay for that time, and he would just get statutory rates, so it is completely unaffordable.

Exactly, yes.

When you are making decisions as a family as to what makes the most sense, in a heterosexual couple it is more likely that the man earns the most money. It does not make sense for him to take a step back from earning when one of you has to drop down to £182 a week. So yes, it definitely makes a difference.

Yes.

Yes.

I am going to try to say this calmly, but absolutely not. As Alex has said, we have a generous system in terms of time. We do not have a generous system in terms of pay. We are in the bottom 10 OECD countries in terms of maternity benefits—that was researched by UNICEF. Our whole parental leave system does not work. The worst part of it is paternity leave, which is why there is such a big push at the moment to change that because it is so bad and we are so behind other countries on it, but our maternity leave system is also very poor. Hacking away at an already inadequate system is not the right answer. We have a really low birth rate in the UK. Out of the G7 countries, we have the lowest birth rate, which is a massive problem for our future. We know that good parental leave policies encourage parents to have babies. If you suddenly start taking maternity leave away from women, what do you think is going to happen? They are going to stop having babies, and we are all going to be in a mess. So, no, do not do that, please.

One thing I would add is that this is relevant to the question earlier about why we ask for six weeks at 90%, and that is because that is what mums get before they drop down to statutory rates. It is very hard to argue that dads and other non-birthing parents should get higher pay than mothers. So, really, we are capped at six weeks at 90% until we look at improving maternity pay as well. We need to make advances on both sides of the coin in order for this to benefit everyone.

Some 76% of mothers have had to rely on some form of debt to get through maternity leave, and four in 10 mothers have taken just 12 weeks or less maternity leave because the pay is so poor.

I am not an expert here—I am just a dad, so I do not know how practical this is—but I know that there is a lot of money put into subsidising childcare. As has been said, the whole system needs to be looked at and revamped, and maybe rethought. As part of that, the question could be, how can we get fathers to be able to help more as well? That might lessen the pressure for childcare, because that is a lot of money. When you think about it, you have strangers looking after your children, when the parents would love to but cannot afford to. That is something that could be looked at, and even just things like allowing for leaving earlier to help and support with school runs. Again, I do not know how this would work in practicality for policy, but it is something that I feel would be taken up by your ordinary person who just wants to find a way to be more involved in their family life.

It is a big step. Alone, it is not going to be the single silver bullet. Paternity leave is part of a web of factors that basically drive people towards traditional gender roles, whether or not that is what they want, and that drive men to become the single primary breadwinner, which means that mums end up as the single caregiver and in charge of the home. The other two big ones are the cost of childcare and poor options around flexible working. Essentially, if you cannot juggle work around picking up the kids from school, one parent has to take a step back from work. If having two kids in childcare costs you £3,000 a month, which is more than most people earn, then it does not make sense for both parents to work. One has to step back. We have to tackle these other areas that put up barriers to both parents being actively involved in looking after their kids. Paternity leave is a major one, but it is not the only one.

We know that other countries that ring-fence paternity leave and pay a decent percentage of salary have a smaller unpaid labour gap. In other words, men do more in the home; they do more of the cooking, cleaning, sock pairing and childcare over the lifetime of that child. It is a trigger for changing the culture, not only in society and in workplaces, but in the home, and that is vital.

From our work, we have acknowledged that, yes, that would be a huge step forward. However, we also need to make sure that after baby arrives, or even before baby arrives, in that antenatal and post-natal period, our systems and services—those universal services—are there to support families and not be purely focused on Mum. There needs to be a real balance there, because there obviously needs to be support for mum—quite rightly, she is the one who has given birth—but services need to be more inclusive of fathers as well. They need to be welcoming; they need to be safe spaces for dads to go. As I have touched on, you could do that in a couple of different ways, and that is certainly what the A Better Start sites have looked at. We have looked at how we can create more inclusive services that welcome fathers, male carers and partners into those and/or how we look at bespoke services for fathers. Certainly, Southend has done a particular piece of work around men’s mental health in the post-natal period and the perinatal mental period. It has very much taken that “Think Family” approach in terms of seeing fathers not as an add-on but as individuals who are equally in need of help, potentially. That has been really crucial. Yes, the leave is the first step forward, and having that protection around that is really important. But do the support services, the networks and the structures that are there then enable fathers and partners to feel included as well, and are they accessible for them?

I just wanted to dig down a bit more into the cultural aspects of what we need to see to change this. It is not just the offer of parental leave; it is about how we as a society see what role fathers play. I know it was some time ago, but we have commentators like Piers Morgan laughing at and mocking people like Daniel Craig for being an active parent and holding their baby in a baby carrier. How do we challenge those traditional ideas, not just from a legal perspective in terms of workers’ rights, but from a cultural one as well? Alex, I wanted to come to you.

Yes, I remember that. To be honest, I will take my cues on masculinity from James Bond, not Piers Morgan.

I think that is probably wise.

There are a lot of different ways to subdivide this, but there is no simple answer, of course. We see this as part of increasingly worrying evidence that a lot of young men, in particular, are being drawn towards far right ideas around what masculinity means. We saw that recently in the German elections, where men under 25 were more likely than the population as a whole to vote for the AfD—for the far right. The crisis in masculinity is an overused phrase, but it reflects something real—that the role of men in society has changed over the last 30 to 40 years. As the role of women has expanded into the workforce, which is a really good thing, we have not done the work as a society to expand the role of men back the other way. That is creating a vacuum, which is being filled by some pretty toxic ideas around how you find status as a man. Fights for things like improving paternity leave, which are coalitional between men and women, and which benefit both men and women, are part of how we say, “Look, this is an alternative idea about how you can be happy and fulfilled as a man in the 21st century,” and hopefully start to push back on some of those other ideas.

Imanuel, you were nodding along to that. Do you have anything you want to add?

Yes. Not many people really follow Piers Morgan, like Alex just said. I would say listen to the everyday man. The people we do not hear from are just your everyday people, whose main focus is their family. In terms of stereotypes and that kind of thing, they do not really care. They are more interested in how they can support their family, and not just financially; they want to spend time with their children and partners. If we were to give more of a voice to that and normalise that voice, then people would know that that is just what it is. Piers Morgan has a platform, and he can say whatever he has to say, but people will choose to ignore the majority of that if you ask me. The other thing has actually just left my mind. I was just writing something down as you said it. I will leave that point.

We are not immune to what happens in America, and there is an increasing presence there in terms of not only the conversation about toxic masculinity, which Alex talked about, but the rising popularity or glamorisation of the trad wife traditions. That is what I meant in terms of the cultural aspect. We could give all the workers’ rights that we would want to see, and that shared parental leave and the improvements, but, culturally, we might not see that take-up. You said that 70% is estimated to be the take-up, but that would probably be an overestimation of where we are right now because, culturally in society, we are not there yet. Joeli?

But if you look at what has happened in Sweden, it has taken a number of years for that take-up to increase. You have to start somewhere, and the law needs to lead the way on this. I have a podcast on raising boys and masculinity—it is called “To Be A Boy”, if anybody wants to tune in. We talk about this a lot, and what has happened in this drive for gender equality is that we have asked girls to be more like boys and boys to continue to be boys. We have said to girls, “Be strong, be a warrior. You can do anything. You can be a computer programmer, a scientist or whatever you want to be.” We have not said to boys, “You can be nurses, you can be stay-at-home dads, you can be really, really great fathers. What sort of dad do you want to be?” The education system could play a role in this by talking to men more about care, connection and the things that truly matter to us as humans. Men have everything except the thing that truly matters: connection, bonding and the ability and freedom to talk about their feelings and express themselves. That starts at a very young age, and we all have a role to play in changing that narrative for men and boys.

Yes, absolutely. This is sexism, and feminine-coded things are devalued constantly. The way we have changed girls and the fact they felt that they had to go into certain jobs, that they had to be stay-at-home parents or that they were weak or “less than” is by sending these messages constantly that, “You are not weak. You are strong. You are powerful. You can be whatever you want to be.” We now need to do that for boys, because we have forgotten about boys. We are not saying to them the things that I have just articulated, about nurture and care: “You can go into female-coded employment,” and all that sort of stuff. We need to think about that narrative a bit more when we are talking to boys.

Thank you so much for all your input and expertise today. I know that the Committee really appreciates it. Thank you for your time. We are going to switch over panels now. I should say that, if there is anything pressing that you were not able to say or articulate today, please follow it up with written evidence to the Committee. Thank you. Witnesses: Dr Sarah Forbes, Abby Jitendra, Dr Gemma Mitchell and Jemima Olchawski.

Hello to our second panel. Welcome, and thank you for joining us. I know that you were all listening to the first panel, so thank you. I want to take some time to introduce the panel. We have Dr Sarah Forbes, senior lecturer at the University of York, and co-director of the Equal Parenting Project, and Abby Jitendra, principal policy adviser from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation—we have already heard a lot about some of its research, so it will be great to hear some more. We also have Dr Gemma Mitchell, associate professor in law at the University of East Anglia, and Jemima Olchawski, chief executive officer from the Fawcett Society. Welcome to you all and thank you so much. I am going to hand over to Christine.

Thank you very much. Thank you all for coming along. Dr Forbes, most witnesses point to the very low take-up of shared parental leave, and some describe it as a failed policy. What would our parental leave system lose if we did not have shared parental leave?

Thank you for that question; it is a very good one. To start, we have done research around shared parental leave with users and companies for about seven years. Through this, we have identified a number of key barriers to uptake, particularly around pay and eligibility. There are also four key sets of benefits that need to be recognised. First, the idea of shared parental leave encapsulates the idea that we, as a country, want to encourage more sharing of care and equal parenting and move away from gendered assumptions about childcare. Secondly, shared parental leave offers greater flexibility than any other form of parental leave policy at the moment. It can be used in blocks, in different amounts, throughout the first year by any eligible parents. For example, in our research we saw a lot of dads using paternity leave after their child was born, and SPL actually supported some mums with their return to work because they felt more comfortable leaving their child with the father than with a stranger. This is what we were being told in our interviews. Also, women are increasingly using shared parental leave, and it is most likely that this is because of the flexibility it offers. Thirdly, this is the only means for dads to take longer than two weeks’ paternity leave. Finally, shared parental leave is currently not accessible to all parents, and this really needs to be addressed. However, we know that many of the women currently using it—who are highly educated, have higher pay and are in dual-income families—are relying on the flexibility it offers to support their labour market attachment and help them return to their careers. This helps support other policy areas, like the gender pay gap and women on boards. Essentially, if we think about it, with any reform that happens, we have to make sure that we retain the benefits that can be received through this system.

That actually reflects something I felt at the time of maternity leave. Once we had finished, my husband and I, because of our careers, were able to arrange flexibility so that he could be there in the first half of the day, and I could be there in the second half. That was very reassuring. What you say about leaving the child with the other parent rather than a stranger is actually important. I wonder if I could ask the others, though. The Fawcett Society and others say that low take-up of SPL means that it currently does not shift the dial very much on equal parenting. Do you believe it could be reformed in a way that would boost take-up and have a greater impact?

Yes, absolutely. We are really delighted that the Committee is looking into this issue. As you have discussed, women are at a significant disadvantage in our economy in terms of pay, access to the most senior roles, and overall earnings. One of the greatest drivers of that is unequal, unpaid caring responsibilities, and one of the most powerful tools we have to address that is shared parental leave. We know that when men take more leave, that supports women’s return to work and increases employment rates, and we know that it changes habits in households over the longer term, so that unpaid caring responsibilities are shared more equally. But, right now, the problem is that it is inaccessible, it is complicated and the levels of remuneration are too low, so that take-up is so low as to have no impact on those things at a broader social level. In particular, that is the case for lower-earning households, and households where people are in self-employment or insecure work. It is important to recognise that those households are much more likely to have black and minoritised mothers, which contributes to a much larger ethnicity motherhood pay penalty. So it has a lot of potential, but it needs to have proper-level rates of pay that make it affordable and accessible for more families and households.

Thank you. What would others like to add?

I agree that shared parental leave is better than nothing. Getting rid of it and replacing it with nothing is a bad idea, for sure. Some of the advantages that Sarah identified could also be replicated with some gender-neutral parental leave, with some blocks of non-transferable leave like the others recommended in the previous panel.

Yes, I broadly agree. One of the things that we found at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation before we did this work on paternity leave is that there is something called a caring penalty in the labour market. That exists for mothers looking after children. Increasingly, that also exists for people looking after their spouse or parents. People doing both are what we would call sandwich carers. The principle that you mentioned—that caring should be something that is shared—is absolutely right. I do not think there are many people in this room who would disagree with that. However, for too long, what we have seen on shared parental leave is a sort of acceptance of the completely mediocre take-up rate. In some ways, it has posed a sort of limit to broader ambitious changes. I would really agree with you that scrapping it entirely with nothing else as a backstop seems completely silly, because many people rely on it, even though we know its limitations. What we need now, as Joeli said in the previous session, is for this Government to really take the reins and do something better, which I am sure we will talk about soon.

Dr Forbes, at what level of take-up do you think SPL would start to have a substantial impact, including on other areas like the pay gap and wider gender equality?

This is where I would just bring it back to the families themselves. Among the families that we have interviewed and engaged with over the years, it had a tremendous impact. It also had a negative impact on those who did not have access. While we also interviewed those who used the policy, we interviewed those who actually wanted to use it, and they outlined the barriers that prevented them from using it. For example, I spoke to one gentleman—I interviewed his wife as well—and he was actually excluded from being able to use shared parental leave. What that meant for him was that he was not able to have any time with his child during the day at all, and he would actually cry and say he wanted more time with his child. He would come home, and the child would be in the crib asleep, so he got no quality time with his child. Essentially, that meant that he had two weeks and then he was expected to be back at work, and he was not able to have that quality time. What it meant for his wife was that she wanted to have him there to support her, and she had nothing. Her family lived far away, so she did not get that support. This meant she was actually going through a very difficult time not being able to have him for a longer time. She wanted him to use that time. Among the families that were able to use it, I can tell you that they had that quality bonding time together and it made a significant difference. This is going to sound really weird, but I had one dad tell me before he took the leave that he would come home and he would just be like, “What is this? Oh, my gosh, everything is like, ugh.” Later, he was able to take extended leave by himself—not just for two weeks at the beginning, when they were not even able to develop routines or anything—and that made a huge difference. Do you know what he said? “I get it.” So, yes, it can make a huge impact on families.

Abby Jitendra, can you see the same reflection in the wider issues, like gender pay gap and equality?

Yes, absolutely. Unpaid leave, or leave where you can sort of trade-off your wife’s or your partner’s leave, is positive. We know that it makes some difference in a system where leave is hard to come by in our labour market. It is definitely not a bad thing, but one thing that we have been calling for recently is a real change in the amount that fathers are automatically entitled to. I am sure you have heard already that paternity leave in this country is the worst in Europe, and we also know that the worst-off families suffer. What that actually means on the ground is a lack of choices, women staying home more and lower wages for women that last a very long time. Fundamentally, as others have said, this is a gender issue, an equity issue and a class issue. So if you want a labour market and a society where we have more gender equality, and where we have more gender equity, then we need to look not just at leave but at pay, because it is really those wage differences that work out and have an exponential impact on the lives of women down the line.

Maybe there is a kind of magic threshold that you get to that creates a tipping point and social change. But, in a way, I do not think we need to worry about that too much, because the international evidence makes it pretty clear that when you get this right the take-up rates are massive. Spain now has equal take-up of parental leave among women and men. Quebec changed its system in the early 2000s, and 93% of men take that paid leave. When it is there and the system works, you get the change. Right now, we are not anywhere near those levels but, actually, it is not impossible to imagine that we can transition to a system where there is a really big shift in those norms.

It seems a lifetime ago now—it was actually 2015, during the general election campaign—but I remember being asked by a journalist, “But what difference does it make in terms of equality?” And I said, “Well, and this might be controversial, if you are interviewing for a job and you see a woman, you’re going to think about whether she will be taking maternity leave. If a guy is coming and he knows he is going to take paternity leave, then you begin to even out the market.” Is that happening, or does that come back to the question of getting to the crucial point?

I do not think we could say that that would be likely right now, and we still see very high rates of maternity discrimination against women. We know that there are bonuses for men in the workplace in terms of pay and esteem, whereas women experience penalties. But there will be a cultural power when that “risk” to employers is equalised. Then we will see a shift in the treatment, because women and men are as likely to need that time out. When men are as likely to need flexibility, time out and support to return to work, those men in positions of power will start to generate more changes in our workplace that benefit everyone else, because I do not think that they would put up with the situation that the majority of women have to experience right now.

Should the reform of shared parental leave be considered alongside the reform of paternity leave in the Government’s proposed review?

Absolutely. I really hope that the Government bring forward their review of leave, which has been promised in the first year. Also, importantly, the Government are really looking to transform childcare, another important part of this puzzle. Our research that looks at where countries have made a big transition internationally has been done hand in hand with reviewing parental leave allocations. If you get those two systems to work effectively together, you can have a bigger impact on childhood outcomes, equality, access to employment, and economic growth. So it is really important that that thinking is done in a joined-up way.

Would anybody else like to add anything to that?

Yes, I completely agree. There is something here about transitioning from our current system to the new system. It is only when we actually have men taking up leave at the same levels as women that we are going to see any of the changes in the labour market and any of the growth benefits, which we will, hopefully, get to in a second. But we are just not there yet because the systems that we have created do not do a good enough job. Absolutely, let us reform shared parental leave, but let us not have any qualms about the fact that, unless we are giving fathers, particularly fathers on a low income, some kind of monetary incentive to actually leave work, they are just not going to do so, and the best evidence we have of that is the system we have now.

We have a system where we have a year for maternity leave—now, 39 weeks of that is paid—and two weeks for paternity leave. In this country, we have some organisations that will be enhancing shared parental leave, but not many. And this is the thing: within those industries, there are likely to be professional services sectors, and they probably have some insight into normalising the visibility of fatherhood in the workplace. Over the years, we have gone into organisations and done research to understand what it is that they are doing. They will have a father’s network, a parenting group that is directly about fathers, and they will have fatherhood champions. The visibility is there but, again, that is not across the UK. So this is something that is not accessible. The pay is very low; it is £184.03 a week. Essentially, because we have a breadwinner culture in this country where men are the breadwinners, they will actually look at that and say, “Well, financially my household would take a hit. My family would take a hit if I was to take that.” So they do not take it. The problem is not that the rich are using it, the ones that have higher education, the ones that are in dual-income households; the problem is no one else is using it. We need to make it so that other people can actually access it. It is really important that we consider reforming shared parental leave, because it is also a means of actually creating cultural change. Like I said before, that is pretty much our only means of extending beyond what would be offered for paternity leave. For any father, if there was going to be a six-week paternity leave, shared parental leave would be the only means of actually going beyond that. So it is really important; it is a huge lever in creating cultural change.

Dr Mitchell, do you want to add anything?

I do not have too much to add. Obviously, I agree that reform would be important. The obvious reform is to replace it with a period of parental leave. I think the previous discussion—I was listening to the panel—highlighted the issues we have around the terminology as well. So we need to start again and get rid of the gendered language around maternity and paternity, and it needs to be updated to be much more inclusive of all the families that are welcoming children. But, yes, to me, the obvious reform in terms of benefits is getting rid of shared parental leave and introducing some gender-neutral parental leave, with that period of non-transferable leave, exactly the same as the previous panel said.

I just wanted to follow up on that point. We have all heard that increasing the rate of statutory pay would substantially increase the take-up of parental leave by dads. What compelling evidence do you have to support that?

Again, if we just look at the cross-country statistics, it is very clear that once you increase pay, there is likely to be uptake. Personally, I would like to add a note of caution around this argument, though, that pay is the only thing. In work that Dr Bendall and I did on class and shared parental leave, we think there are a couple of factors that would still suggest that, even with a much better level of pay, there would still be disparity in terms of who is taking leave. In particular, it is more likely that working-class dads are still going to be under-represented in taking leave. That is partly because, although we have heard a lot about how attitudes are changing towards gendered parenting roles, that obviously is not always true across all sectors of society, and there is still, perhaps, more inclination towards traditional roles within working-class parenting families. I would also add that when attitudes and behaviours clash, the research is very clear that it is attitudes that change rather than behaviour. Even if people are saying, “Yes, we’re all for equal parenting,” when push comes to shove and that becomes difficult, it is much more likely that the attitudes will shift rather than behaviour. The other big factor—and I want to add a note of caution as I say this—that suggests that it will not lead to universal uptake is that, even in these paradigm countries that we talk about, like Norway and Sweden, the research is still very clear that working-class dads are taking less; they are more likely to lose their leave rather than use it, compared to other dads or other parents. The note of caution is obviously that the situation in those countries is very different to the one in the UK, and this is an area that we need a lot more research into. Increasing pay will lead to a huge, substantial change, but it might not lead to that huge, substantial change in certain sectors of society.

We are talking about uptake given the current system, but might I briefly talk through some of the research that we did? A lot of the discussion is around the cost of this policy. We are obviously talking about pay, and we are hoping that Government will pay for it, which takes away some unintended consequences of a business-funded policy. We know that there are benefits, because there are direct benefits from increased tax revenues from more women entering the labour market, and there are indirect benefits to the economy from women entering the labour market and having higher production. We calculated that there is something like a £200 million net cost, which is primarily driven by the cost of paternity pay, but a £2.7 billion, or £2.68 billion, benefit. We do not say that there is not a cost of men leaving the labour market, but the benefit of women entering the labour market is really dwarfing that number. That is just a bit of context, but the reason why that is relevant to what we are talking about here is that that works—it works in our country, and it works in other countries—if as many men as possible take up the policy. Currently, we have a big gap in this country around self-employed fathers. We can talk about uptake as much as we want within the subsection that we are talking about, but if a large section of our labour market, of our families, do not even have any access to paternity pay or leave at all, then that is really going to stop this being the kind of growth benefit policy that it has the possibility to be. We know that Government really care about growth, and if we want it to work, we are going to need something like a paternity allowance, something akin to a maternity allowance. So just a note that take-up is to do with culture, but also to do with the availability of the policy. We know that loads of men and families, many of whom are on low incomes, are running small businesses or working for themselves. That is going to need to change if we want to harness the benefits both at a household level and at a national level.

Thank you. I just had a quick question for Gemma around those cultural barriers that you talked about. What can Government do to remove some of those cultural barriers, and should consideration of cultural factors be included in the Government review?

It is very hard to change some of those cultural factors. In Sweden, as we have heard, parental leave and parenting equality have been on the agenda and pushed very hard for five decades since the ‘70s and, like I said, there is still this class discrepancy in terms of dads’ take-up. Sweden famously campaigned to try to promote the idea of dads’ involvement. For example, on milk bottles and stuff like that, the Government would promote the importance of dads and how good that can be. However, one of the main things that we would also need is some change to the workplace. Again, in Dr Bendall’s and my research, we know that in the more working class-dominated workplaces, there are less positive attitudes towards taking leave, towards working flexibly and all those sorts of things, so we need to find a way to drive that. What I always come back to in my research as a labour lawyer is the role of things like trade unions and workplace bodies to try to push that change on the ground. Joeli was saying earlier that the law should be an important start in terms of making that change, and I totally agree, but we need to think a little about what happens in the workplace as well. Trade unions are the obvious place to start, but they have been very much changed and are now mainly working in more middle-class-dominated occupations and so on. To me, that seems a really obvious avenue to go down.

We should also think about this in a very long-term way and look at the way those norms and stereotypes are embedded from childhood. Of course, we did a big piece of work a few years ago looking at the power and prevalence of those stereotypes. For instance, by the time children are six, they are more likely to associate kindness with girls and intelligence with boys. We are consistently replicating and reinforcing these very restrictive ideas about what it means to be a girl and what it means to be a boy. We need a policy system around shared parental leave that facilitates and encourages change, but we also need to get in there early and stop reinforcing those things. That is about childcare settings and our education settings. It is also about responsibilities for corporates in the products they are creating and the messaging. There is really strong evidence that messaging on children’s clothing reinforces these ideas, as do representations of children on television and the characters that they see in books. Still today, boys and male characters and white characters are massively disproportionately represented versus girls and people of colour. There is a broader responsibility in stopping reinforcing these ideas about what girls do and what boys do, which is connected to inoculating young people against some of those far-right ideas being proliferated by the likes of Andrew Tate, as well as preventing violence against women and girls. These are the seeds of those attitudes.

There was a video shared by BBC News recently from a nursery in Sweden, I think it was, where they showed boys and girls switching stereotypes. Boys were being taught about kindness, gentle hands and caring, and young girls were being taught to be strong. They did that for an hour, and it was a really interesting watch. I would implore the Committee and others to definitely have a look at that. I want to talk a little about barriers to take-up. Dr Mitchell, you used shared parental leave yourself, did you not? What was your experience of the scheme?

I did not use it; my partner did. I have only taken maternity leave. Obviously, I have been researching this for too long to mention. Well over 10 years ago, I started my PhD, which looked at exactly this. In terms of people who were committed to using the scheme, I do not think you could have found anyone much more committed going into this. Obviously, that was a key concern in finding a partner who was equally committed. So we went into it knowing that that was what we were going to do and always being very clear on that. It was a really positive experience for my family. My partner took five months of leave; I took seven. It was amazing. The relationship that they have together as dad and son is amazing to watch. Sometimes they are too close, and I get a little jealous of that. Undoubtedly, as Sarah said, for families like mine it was a huge benefit. There are a couple of things to bear in mind. Even though I went in knowing about all the issues with notice requirements and stuff like that, it was still a nightmare working it out with HR and it was still very difficult. My partner was the first man ever to take it at the organisation that he worked in. If it was not for me kind of pushing it and being really Rottweiler-ish about it, it might not have happened so easily. There were comments. I know he had comments like, “Oh, how did you wangle that?”, as if it was an added bonus. Even going into it with that awareness, I would still say that managing it was difficult. The other thing that I was not expecting was when it came time to swap. I did not want to do it, actually; I felt like I was giving away something that was mine, and Freddie, my partner, felt like he was taking something that was mine. Although it was the right decision and I am so glad we did it, if I had made the decision at seven months as to whether I was going to transfer, I would not have done it. And that is, like I said, someone who has gone in with about as much commitment to this as you could possibly imagine. One of the main problems with this transferable model is that there was this default idea that it was mine. That is what we need to challenge and why transferable maternity leave is never going to work. I would also say that we fit fully into all the other factors in terms of people who take this. I am the higher earner out of the two of us, so we are bucking the gender pay gap trends. We are both dual income, and we are both on a very comfortable middle-class wage. So, yes, we did not buck any trends in any of those regards.

Brilliant, thank you. You have mentioned, obviously, some complexities around the eligibility criteria and employers’ lack of understanding of the scheme. These have been identified as key flaws of the scheme in addition to what you have mentioned. How could those be addressed, if at all?

The fundamental way to address them is to get rid of the transferable model of leave. The difficulty is the conversing and handing notice to two employers. We did it in two blocks, so we did it as simply as possible. There was no further transferring or anything after that. But it was still such hard work, and getting HR to understand it was a lot more difficult than I anticipated. Again, this is another clear reason in my mind as to why the transferable model has to be scrapped and replaced with gender-neutral leave, with blocks of non-transferable leave.

What do you think is the function of the current earnings criteria, and what would be the effects of scrapping them?

Sorry, what do you mean by the earnings criteria?

Around the eligibility for take-up of the scheme and the earnings.

The fact that it is the higher-income people?

Yes.

That is a good question. Does anyone else want to answer it?

Both people in the partnership having to be employees. So, I might be employed and my partner might be self-employed, and then I cannot access it, or vice versa. It is a really substantial problem, particularly given this point that we have got to, that if we really want to normalise take-up and deal with those gaps—particularly the ethnicity motherhood pay gap, where there are higher levels of self-employment and insecure work—we have to make this something that is for families and parents, not just for a particular “privileged” group of employees. We would absolutely support extending that eligibility.

Thank you, both, for clarifying that. I totally agree that that is really key. I know we have talked a lot about self-employed workers as well but, as a lawyer, it is not even workers; we are looking at employees, which is the highest level of protected workers. And you have to have been in the same job basically since the time of conception. That excludes too many people, and we know that that disproportionately excludes working-class families or people who are in precarious work, who we know are more likely to be from ethnic minority backgrounds and so on. So it is all working to exclude the same people and to enable access to that different, opposite group of people.

It creates these perverse incentives and this kind of stickiness in employment, where you cannot move because you might end up having a baby. You might lose your entitlements for both parents, and then people are not getting those opportunities to increase their earnings through job moves, which is a really important way to do that. And employers are not getting the right workers in the right place, because there is this sort of stickiness in the labour market. So it is bad news all round.

Sarah, you favour relatively modest changes to paternity leave, while keeping and reforming the shared parental leave scheme. Can your proposal overcome some concerns around shared parental leave’s maternal transfer model, and how much impact on take-up would you expect your proposal to have?

I am going to refer to my notes. We put in a number of different proposals designed for different scenarios and objectives. Two key approaches are extending paternity leave and pay to six weeks at 90%, which moves us towards more gender-equal non-transferable leave. Obviously, there is still a big gap. The second is actually improving take-up of SPL by combining increased paternity pay and shared parental pay. This would involve two weeks’ paternity leave at 90% of pay, with the option of utilising four weeks of shared parental pay, enhanced at 90% of pay if used by the parent who is not using maternity leave. Essentially, this allows dads and other parents up to six weeks at 90% of pay, which will make leave much more accessible for all parents, including lower-income parents. There are obviously other issues at hand as well, but it would make it more accessible to lower-income parents, as long as eligibility is also tackled. This approach, unlike merely extending paternity leave to six weeks at 90% of pay, also encourages the use of shared parental leave, a narrative and a change to cultural norms and shared caring, and could act as a catalyst for further use of shared parental leave and shared caring. While this approach does not overcome all the issues with the maternal transfer mechanism, it encourages families to share care and support each other. If such an approach was combined with a gradual increase in non-transferable, well-paid leave for parents not using maternity leave, we could start to move away from the maternal transfer mechanism over time, like what was being referred to in relation to Spain.

Jemima and Gemma, talking about international comparisons, which countries’ parental leave systems should the Government be looking to for evidence to inform their review?

The Spanish model is interesting because it has stepped up provision over time. There are 16 weeks of full-paid leave for fathers in Spain and that, as I said, has a very high take-up. What is interesting is the transition that it did, where it increased leave over time from a very low level. Quebec also has a use-it-or-lose-it system, which—I think we all agree—is a fundamental feature of a successful system. There, you can see the significant impact on maternal employment and the pay gap, because they introduced that in Quebec but not in other areas of Canada. There are of course also the Scandinavian countries. The challenge there is that, because our wider kind of welfare system is so different, it can feel a bit distant. So it can be useful to look at countries that have made that change and that shift from something that is a bit more similar to the way in which our model is established.

It is interesting you mentioned Spain, because it was mentioned in the previous panel. In terms of use it or lose it, what is Quebec doing in terms of timeframe and levels of pay? Gemma, I am going to put you on the spot.

I would obviously agree. There is a reason that we always talk about the Scandinavian countries, and that is because what they are doing has proven to be so effective, but there are obviously concerns about following that same trajectory. Portugal has been interesting as a country that has stuck with transferable leave, but that has had slightly more success because it has introduced a bonus month of paid leave if the dad takes a month of leave by himself, so that is quite an interesting one. Certainly, the uptake in Portugal is much better than here, for example. I do not have the figures in front of me I am afraid, but it is around 50% and, obviously, it is improving all the time. There are other ways we could look at the transferable model. However, in some ways there are limited lessons we could learn from Portugal, even though that sounds good in theory. That is partly because of the short amount of time that it is available in Portugal, like Spain, where it is looking at a much shorter condensed period of leave anyway. If the option is five or six months of leave, then obviously at six months you are still in a key part of small babydom, where another month would sound much more appealing, and again it is at high pay. However, if we introduce something like that here, I would have more concerns over whether there would be the same advantage, for example, to making it 12 to 13 months. Is that going to be as appealing to parents? Certainly, it will not be if we stick with the bad model of low pay.

Can we try to condense some of the answers?

Sorry.

No, they are really good, but if there is anything that you need to go into in more detail, please follow up with written evidence. Thank you.

Sarah, can you explain why you are sceptical about the feasibility of directly replicating the much more equal parental leave systems of some other countries?

Essentially, what we are proposing is something similar to what has been suggested in Spain, which is to use shared parental leave to create a norm, to change this idea of who is caring for the child. It is trying to actually make sure that we are addressing those cultural expectations that are basically present, saying, “Mum, you stay at home and look after the child. Dad, you go to work.” We are trying to make sure that it is utilised to create change. Have I answered the question? I cannot quite recall the question itself.

It was to do with the fact that you are sceptical about the feasibility of the UK having equal shared parental leave.

We need to work towards creating that change or having established change in actual uptake in parental leave. Again, using the shared parental leave system with paternity leave, we are actually prioritising creating a cultural shift in who is caring for the child. We are not against it; we actually put it forward as another proposal. We were addressing the question of how to increase uptake of shared parental leave with the inclusion of that proposal using shared parental leave. If there was just the increase to six weeks with paternity leave, for example, we would have some increase in paternity leave, but then it would hit a ceiling. What we are actually trying to say is that it is really important that we ask the question, where do we want to get to in relation to achieving more equal parenting or a better opportunity for achieving equal parenting? Using shared parental leave is certainly one way to do that, so we want to try to make sure that we address those cultural barriers that are preventing more shared care in the meantime.

Thank you all so much for coming to the panel today; I have learned so much already. This is a question for Jemima, and it is about the full review of parental leave that is coming up. Could you share what you think should be the broad objectives of the Government’s proposed parental leave review?

Absolutely. Overall, this has to be about increasing uptake, equalising unpaid caring responsibilities and getting as close as we can to equal—or having the opportunity for it to be equal within households where they are making unencumbered choices. It also needs to take into account supporting women’s employment and their return to employment, and fathers’ time to bond with their children and support their partners. It is also important that we retain the recognition that birth has a physical impact on women. There should be time and recognition of that, in the recovery needed and support for breastfeeding, where women choose to do that. It is a vital part of supporting a more equal economy and economic growth, as well as child development outcomes.

By which metrics and what timescale do you think success should be measured? That is probably to Jemima, but anyone can chip in.

It will take a period of time for take-up to improve, but I think JRF has some evidence about the sorts of things playing out within a couple of years which perhaps, Abby, you would want to speak to. I do not want to use your evidence while you are here.

We should probably frame this, again, in terms of benefits and not just costs, because there will be an up-front cost to Government. The work that we have been doing with the Centre for Progressive Policy shows that impacts are likely to be felt around two to three years after the policy is introduced, and that is what we see in other countries. The main driver there is people learning about the policy, taking it up in the workplace and just having babies, so these changes do not happen initially. As these changes and the take-up start to increase, that is when you start seeing the growth benefits. I guess, to jump on your question, Catherine, Government need to frame this around what the changes are that you will see at household level—the increased freedom, and the increased space and agency around choices—that will make a really measurable difference within this Parliament. But then, what are the bigger economic changes that we will see? The main driver of what sounds like a pretty big number—the £2.68 billion, £2.7 billion benefit—is women making the choice in their households to go out to work, when previously they would not have done so. That could be to go back to work sooner, or it could be a broader cultural change. The choices that are being made between partners are such that you see dads staying home more with their kids. Actually, you get far more free decisions about who stays home and looks after the kids and who goes out to work. That is the kind of cultural change that we are looking for. We want to see a systemic change in the choices that people make. That is ultimately what is going to get more money in the pockets of families and more money in the pockets of women down the line, and change the norm that we have that women stay home and look after the kids, and dads go out to work. As I said, it is two to three years. Our model looks at 19 countries, so it is a really big sample. You have your European and Scandinavian countries; you have your southern European countries as well that have a really different system; and you have some North American areas. So, this is not a culturally bounded model and evidence that we are looking at; we are looking across the piece. The thing that connects all this work is what happens when you give people one, two or three additional weeks of paternity leave, and all the benefit comes from the amount of pay that is there to incentivise dads.

Thank you very much. Finally, again to you, Abby, how would you like to see the review of parental leave conducted? For example, should it include a full public consultation or more targeted work with employers?

I will not repeat what I have just said, but it definitely needs to work with employers. That is so important. We have talked about take-up in terms of individual and household choices, but a lot of this is, as you said, the culture of the workplace. Is your boss saying, “Oh, you are going to have a baby. That sounds really exciting. Do you know when you’re going to be taking your paternity leave?” Or are they not very supportive of that? This is really about making it work for employers, and we know that employers are going to be having a lot of change with the Employment Rights Bill. This is not about bearing down on employers. This is about saying, actually, at a macro level—at a workforce level—you will see real benefits, and you will see happier workers. But the way to do that is to engage with employers at the outset.

This is the last couple of questions, and they are also for you, Abby. What would be the advantages of the Government using the model recently developed by yourselves with the Centre for Progressive Policy in assessing the economic impacts of parental leave reform?

The first thing I would say is that the Government and DBT will have brilliant economists who, I hope, are thinking about this question. So this is not to say that that work is not already happening. The reason we wanted to do this work at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is that we get so bogged down in the cost of policy. We are so weary of hearing that x policy will cost £x billion. It just feels like there is not much fiscal space to do anything. But there are policy changes that will have a net benefit, and we wanted to explore what those benefits were. As I said earlier, this is not about saying that there are no costs at all. We need to be grown up about what the cost of this policy will be. We need Government to fund paternity pay. We need a paternity allowance, so that self-employed dads and families are not missed out. However, those changes will have an impact; there will be a benefit, and it will pay, which is really brilliant. That is quite rare in social policy. I work for an anti-poverty charity, and a lot of what we do is talk about the cost of policies. But this policy has an actual measurable benefit, so I am really hoping that Government will frame this, in time, in the ways we have done with this model and, hopefully, building on it.

Do you think it is realistic to expect that, rather than their usual focus on direct fiscal implications?

This is a much bigger conversation than this room, and it probably extends far into the Treasury. I guess what I would say is that we have tried to be as conservative and robust as we can be. We have looked at 25 studies; we have looked at 19 countries. We are focused on something very specific, which is, for every additional week of paternity leave that you give families, what is the cost and what is the benefit? There are much wider benefits that we have not tabulated—things like the health benefits or the wider social benefits. This is very specific around the economy, because that is what we think the current political discussion is missing and what it needs right now.

How confident are you that the net economic benefits of reform would actually be realised over, say, two or three years?

That is a really good question. We are relying on international data here. Part of the reason we are all in this room is that we do not yet have the support that we need. There is not that much evidence which shows exactly how long this will take, but there is one very robust paper which says that the benefits tend to be realised around two to three years, which is to do with take-up and people learning about the policy. But we also see variance between countries. For example, one of the areas that the model was looking at was California, and the benefits in that area were extremely low, partly because very few fathers took up that support. Conversely, in Iceland there was a huge amount of support that was taken up, and that really turbocharged the growth benefits. Both those areas started with a very low level, so everything we have been looking at is starting from a very low level and getting to a higher level. We are trying to control for the situation that we have now, which is that we are starting from a very low level. This is not to say that I can say 100% that it will be two to three years, but this is the evidence we have available, and we really hope that the Government are taking this kind of evidence into account to make sure that they are not just looking at this as a balance sheet loss, but also as a balance sheet gain.

Thank you so much to you all for your expertise and your time today, and for coming at the beginning of this session and listening to what the first panel said. It has been a really informative session; thank you so much. That brings this session to a close.