Summary
The Government must reform workplace policies to support fathers to better balance their parental responsibilities and work and to ensure they meet the needs of the twenty-first century family. Fathers in particular want to be supported at work to take a more equal share of childcare when children are young.
The Government says it wants to “enable families to share caring roles more easily and equitably to deliver positive employment outcomes.”1 However, we have heard evidence from employer organisations, unions, researchers, think-tanks and experts, but most importantly from fathers and mothers themselves, that the current policies supporting fathers in the workplace do not deliver what they promise, despite good intentions. This is particularly the case for less well-off fathers. The right to request flexible working has not created the necessary cultural change in the workplace and the Government itself told us that its shared parental leave policy, intended to allow fathers to share care in their child’s first year, will not meet its objective for most fathers. The Government’s campaign in 2018 to promote shared parental leave is welcome but will not be enough to deliver the kind of change the Government wants to see for fathers and their families.
Paid paternity leave was only introduced in the UK in 2003, and this historical lack of workplace support for fathers both reflects and reinforces cultural assumptions about traditional gender roles where the father is the breadwinner and the mother is the primary carer. While we recognise and welcome the positive steps forward there have been for working fathers in recent years, we do not think they should have to wait longer for workplace policies to catch up with the social changes that are taking place in men and women’s lives. Incremental change now will not meet the needs of fathers, mothers, children or the economy in the future.
Our recommendations are framed to balance the needs of fathers, mothers and employers. Most of all, they are intended to help the Government to deliver its objectives of creating real change in the lives of fathers and mothers. Our key recommendations are:
- Fathers who are employees should be entitled to paid time off to attend antenatal appointments as a day-one right. The Government should consider whether the entitlement to attend two appointments is sufficiently supportive for parents of multiple babies or where other factors mean additional appointments are required;
- Statutory paternity pay should be paid at 90 per cent of the father’s pay (capped for higher earners) to ensure that all fathers, regardless of income, can be at home around the time of their child’s birth;
- The Government should consider the costs and benefits of introducing a new policy of 12 weeks’ dedicated leave for fathers in the child’s first year to replace shared parental leave when it reviews this policy in 2018;
- The Government should seek to legislate immediately to make a reality the Prime Minister’s call for all jobs to be advertised as flexible from day one, unless there are solid business reasons not to;
- The Government should act now to harmonise workplace rights for fathers who are agency workers or self-employed with those for employed fathers where practical;
- To help drive the cultural change in the workplace that the Government wishes to see, it should consider the benefits of amending the protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010 to add an additional characteristic of ‘paternity’, looking at what period such a characteristic would cover and to which groups of working fathers it would apply.
15 March 2018