This blog post is based on an article published in Social Policy and Society by Anna Tarrant, Linzi Ladlow, Alison Koslowski, Harriet Churchill, Naomi Finch, and Patricia Hamilton.
When Labour returned to government in 2024, parental leave reform sat near the top of its promises to working families. The manifesto and Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay signalled an ambitious agenda: day-one rights to leave and pay, a doubling of statutory parental pay, and an additional month of paternity leave paid at 90 per cent of earnings on a ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ basis. More than a year on, the picture looks very different.
The Employment Rights Act 2025 has delivered some reform. From 6 April 2026, Paternity Leave and unpaid parental leave became day-one rights, and a new Bereaved Partner’s Paternity Leave came into force.
Yet the wider promise of reform has largely stalled. Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP) and Statutory Paternity Pay (SPP) rose only from £187.18 to £194.32 a week, little more than inflation. Crucially, while leave itself is now available from day one, eligibility for paternity pay still requires 26 weeks’ continuous service. Self-employed parents remain excluded from paid parental leave altogether, beyond the limited maternity allowance scheme.
In our recent article, we argue that this pattern of delivering low-cost reforms while delaying more transformative change reveals deeper assumptions about care, families, and economic value. It also highlights the persistence of policy-driven inequalities, despite growing calls for reform, including from the Women and Equalities Committee.
From watershed to ‘wait-and-see’
The UK parental leave system has changed little since the 1970s. Although reforms under New Labour and the Coalition government expanded maternity leave and introduced Shared Parental Leave (SPL), change has largely been incremental. SPL was intended to encourage flexibility and greater paternal involvement in childcare, yet only around two per cent of fathers use it. The reasons for this vary: statutory pay is too low for many families to make taking leave financially viable. Eligibility rules exclude self-employed and precariously employed parents, administration is complex, and the transferable design means fathers and partners can only access leave if mothers give up part of their entitlement.
In practice, then, the reforms implemented so far are more symbolic than transformative. Day-one leave rights matter, especially for workers in insecure jobs, but unpaid leave is not financially viable for many families. Furthermore, the most significant proposal for redistributing care, a month of well-paid, non-transferable paternity leave, has not been legislated. Fathers can now technically take leave from the first day of employment, but many cannot afford to do so because statutory pay remains capped at £194.32 a week and still depends on 26 weeks’ service.
The cost of treating care as a private matter
Labour’s emerging approach reflects what welfare scholars describe as a liberal welfare logic, where the state intervenes minimally and families are expected to make private choices about work and care. The problem is that such choices are heavily shaped by policy.
New ONS analysis published in October 2025 shows that mothers’ monthly earnings drop by 42 per cent in the five years after a first birth, an average loss of around £1,051 a month. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation calls this the ‘caring penalty’ and estimates that, for mothers, it can exceed £100,000 in lost gross pay over six years.
When statutory pay is set at less than half the National Living Wage, fathers in households where men typically out-earn women also cannot afford to take leave, especially after week 39 when statutory payments end altogether.
The result is a system that positions mothers primarily as carers, while presenting that outcome as a neutral product of family preference. Workplace cultures often compound this problem. Employers are often unclear about their obligations, paternity cover is rare, and fathers who take leave are often treated as ‘ghosts’ in the organisational machine.
Layered on top are the inequalities the system simply does not support. Self-employed fathers and second parents have no access to paid parental leave at all. Around four million people in the UK are self-employed, and those in zero-hours and agency work, disproportionately working-class and minority ethnic families, are excluded by eligibility rules built around stable, full-time employment with a single employer. Young fathers in education or precarious work also tell us how this exclusion damages their ability to bond with their babies and support their partners.
Other countries show another way is possible
Comparison with other international systems suggests other ways of designing parental leave are possible, while achieving a greater balance between social inclusion and economic productivity. Spain’s recent equalisation of parental leave at sixteen weeks for each parent, with mandatory periods and generous income replacement, has lifted paternal uptake from 46 per cent to over 75 per cent. Germany’s Elterngeld, with its bonus for sharing, has pushed fathers’ uptake to 43 per cent. Nordic countries have also long treated parental leave as an active instrument of gender equality rather than a private family matter.
These systems share common features, including individual, non-transferable entitlements for each parent, adequate pay, clear labelling of leave as belonging to fathers, and access from day one of employment. They also share a result: smaller gender pay gaps, smaller employment gaps between mothers and fathers, and stronger evidence of economic benefit. UK think tank modelling suggests that extending paternity leave to six weeks at 90 per cent of earnings would deliver a net economic benefit of around £2.7 billion a year. In other words, care-centred policy and economic productivity are mutually reinforcing, not competing, goals.
Beyond incremental reforms
Where Labour only makes marginal adjustments, extensive evidence highlights the need for a change of paradigm. The April 2026 reforms have achieved what is politically easiest and fiscally least costly, leaving pay rates, the qualifying period for paternity pay, the transferable structure of shared parental leave, and the exclusion of self-employed parents largely untouched. Reframing care as a public good with collective implications, rather than a private negotiation, is the conceptual shift that has unlocked progress elsewhere. It is also the shift the Women and Equalities Committee has urged the government to embrace, warning that ‘tinkering around the edges’ will let down families.
If Labour wants its reforms to deliver for families and for the economy, three things require investment: 1) individual, non-transferable entitlements for both parents; 2) pay levels that make leave genuinely affordable; and 3) eligibility rules that include self-employed, precariously employed, and student parents. Anything less will reproduce a system that excludes the families who most need support, while undermining the very economic goals the government says it wants to achieve.
Reference
Tarrant, Anna et al. 2026. “Appraising the UK Labour Government’s Early Approach to Reforming Parental Leave: The Limits of Incrementalism for Gender Equality and Social Inclusion.” Social Policy and Society: 1–14. doi: 10.1017/S147474642610133X.
About the Authors
Anna Tarrant is Professor of Sociology, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, and Founding Director of the Centre for Innovation in Fatherhood and Family Research, University of Lincoln, UK.
Linzi Ladlow is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, University of Lincoln, UK.
Alison Koslowski is Professor of Social Policy, University College London, UK.
Harriet Churchill is Senior Lecturer, University of Sheffield, UK
Naomi Finch is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy, University of York, UK.
Patricia Hamilton is Lecturer in Sociology, University of York, UK.
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