Dads deserve a better paternity deal – so does the economy

Séamas O'Reilly

Dads deserve a better paternity deal – so does the economy

New fathers who want to bond with their babies are treated in a derisory way in the UK – and that harms us all

Not long after I read that campaign group The Dad Shift was marching on the Department of Business and Trade today to demand changes to paternity leave, I spoke with my father.

He’s my first port of call for anything parenting-related, because he has a lot of experience, and is fond of asking me how things have changed for parents now, in comparison with his day. Usually, he asks such questions with the same curious tone with which he asks me about bubble tea or Reformer Pilates, odd quirks of modernity that he only hears tell of from us, his newfangled 21st-century children. He has 11 of us, who’ve provided him with 20 grandchildren and thus a constant window into how parenting has shifted since he was first at its coalface, half a century ago.

Of course, he says – with the finest Yorkshireman impression a man from rural Fermanagh can muster – when it comes to paternity leave, he had it tough. For each of us, my father received paid leave for two or three days, which he supplemented thereafter with holiday days. Cobbling together anything more than two weeks via this method would have been fanciful; more than three weeks, positively science fiction.

He laments the wrench he felt at having to leave each newborn baby at home and the financial pressure placed on him to do so. This feeling, however, is one borne from hindsight. At the time, the idea that he could share equal, or even slightly more equal, care-giving responsibilities with my mother was unreachably exotic. He sounds happy as he tells me how greatly things have improved since then.

Correcting my dad is one of my favourite pastimes, but in this case I’m sorry to have to do so. The thing about paternity leave in the UK is that it barely exists. The UK offers the lowest such entitlement in Europe, a truly derisory offering of two weeks’ statutory leave, via which fathers and secondary caregivers are given just £187 a week (or 90% of their weekly wage, if that number is lower). This figure is less than half of the national living wage. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, it is a logistically infeasible, not to mention morally insulting, sum for new fathers to survive on.

But it gets worse: many fathers don’t even get that pittance, since self-employed dads, such as me, are excluded from the scheme altogether.

Comparisons with Europe are stark… in Sweden each family unit gets 480 days, with 90 of those reserved solely for the father

I took two weeks off from my full-time job when my son was born. By the time my daughter arrived, I’d gone freelance. In some ways, this was a boon for my wife and me – giving me more flexibility than someone in full-time work, during those first early weeks of my daughter’s life. In reality, doing this for any extended period meant turning down jobs and suffering the massive financial upheaval that would require. The decision we made, that I would keep working while she took full maternity leave, was the only remotely viable option on the table. It was not even, in any meaningful sense of the word, a decision. It was the choice between paying the rent and not, which is no kind of choice at all.

When I spoke to my dad, he was sure – no, entirely positive – that dads like me can now swap paid parental cover with our partners for weeks at a time. He was referring, I suppose, to Shared Parental Leave (SPL), a scheme introduced in 2014 to much fanfare, but which was excoriated in a report published yesterday by the Women and Equalities Committee. It describes SPL as “a financial non-starter for most” that “excludes a wide range of working parents, including the self-employed and other non-employee workers, and those on low pay”. It adds that “the criteria are far too complicated for the average parent and employer to understand”. It is perhaps for those reasons that only 2% of new parents avail themselves of the scheme at all.

The report, written by a cross-party group of MPs, takes aim at the iniquities of paternity leave in Britain, and suggests that it be raised to six weeks off work, during which dads are given 90% of their usual salary, whether they’re in full-time or self-employment, to bring the UK in line with other European nations.

Certainly, the comparisons with every other country in Europe are stark. Spanish dads get 16 weeks of full pay, while in France, dads get 28 days’ full pay, and in Sweden each family unit gets 480 days, with 90 of those reserved solely for the father.

Promoting greater fatherly involvement in child-rearing is something 86% of dads want, and has been shown to be hugely beneficial to all parties, in terms of bonding, mental health and child development. Greater provision of paternity leave is also a massive benefit to women. Its absence inevitably trends toward entrenching rigid gender roles and financial loss for female partners, a process exacerbated by, and exacerbating further, the gender pay gap that currently exists for women during child-rearing years.

Such a situation is not merely absurd, unfair, inhumane and a shameful global outlier. It’s also ruinous for the one thing the UK government has ever reliably pretended to care about: the economy.

In April, researchers at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation calculated that increasing the statutory rate to six weeks at 90% of a father’s earnings would deliver £2.68bn to the public purse. Its report found that mothers, freed from the all-but-mandatory expectation of enduring reduced earnings for each child they choose to have, “are more likely to undertake paid work and work more as they are less constrained by solo unpaid childcare and domestic work… [generating] economic gains as women contribute more tax, have more to spend in the economy, and claim less in social security”.

Families deserve so much better than a system that penalises mums, dads and children. We deserve a system that does not shame our own parents, who would be forgiven for thinking things have improved since their day. We deserve an approach to parental leave that does not levy a cost to society, and the economy, that we can no longer afford and need no longer bear. We deserve for these issues to be addressed with dignity and compassion. At this point, we’ll settle for common sense.

Paternity leave: the facts

The UK has one of the most unequal statutory parental leave systems in the developed world. Statutory paternity leave is a maximum of two weeks – equivalent to the lowest paternity pay offers in the EU and one of the lowest among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations.
In 2015, the UK government introduced a statutory Shared Parental Leave (SPL) scheme, allowing mothers to “share” leave and pay with their partner. A government analysis in 2023 of SPL found that only 5% of eligible fathers used the scheme.
Additional research by the Centre for Progressive Policy found that only 12% of fathers with a household income of £20,000 to £25,000 had access to – and had taken – their full entitlement of employer-enhanced parental leave and pay, compared with 51% of fathers with a household income of more than £200,000.
The statutory paternity pay rate of £187.18 per week is less than half the national living wage for workers aged over 21. Affordability has been found to be the leading reason for couples deciding not to use the statutory SPL.

By Phoebe Davis