Stat maternity pay should be relative to earnings

[nappyvalley2024]

Why is statutory maternity leave a flat rate after the initial 6 weeks?

It would be fairer to have it linked to earnings for 3-6 months. Families in higher incomes will find the drop in pay more significant than those on lower incomes and would have been paying more NI.

This leads to higher earning women having to take shorter mat leaves than those on lower incomes.

The state needs people to have children!

Exactly another example of how the middle classes get pissed on.

i’m middle class and sure as heck don’t feel pissed on

I earn a 6 figure salary. DH earns a 6 figure salary that is 5x mine. We are middle class (though I hate that phrase). And we happily pay NI and income tax because we realise how privileged we are and how it makes sense that the more we earn, the more we give as there are many people worse off than us.

Check your privilege.

again.

Not privilege

the op is thick and lacks basic understanding

I actually think maternity pay should be higher but maybe for less time if the state cant afford it. So rather than 9 months of not enough, you get 6 months of enough. Employers could still offer more. But i dont think that would be popular.

Things arent all relative. There is a basic standard of living that we all need and then really its all just wants.

So the disabled and many people will die young due to no pension.

Do lower earners not have heating to pay then or council tax? Clothes for the kids?

That's inaccurate. It refers to maternity pay during the mother's compulsory time off (34 weeks of pregnancy to eight weeks after the birth. Before the birth the mother can work if she wants to but the employer can't insist. After the birth, for those eight weeks, she can't work even if she wants to). During this time, statutory health insurance provides the 13 euro/day and the employer covers the rest, up to full pay, as in your information. After this, statutory maternity/paternity pay kicks in., and this is entirely different. It's 65% of the person's average net income from the 12 months before the birth, up to a maximum payment of 1800 Euro a month, but it can be up to 100% if you are a low earner - I think there's a sliding scale. The minimum payment is 300 Euro a month - everyone gets this whether they were working before the birth or not. This covers another 12 months, or up to 14 if you are a lone parent or the parents split it (any split is possible - 12 months one parent/2 months the other, half each, both taking it at the same time, etc). Or parents can opt to have it paid out at half rate over two years. If a parent goes PT rather than giving up work completely, they can get the same proportion of their loss covered for the same period.

It's a massive help to low and middle earners, and helps higher earners while still expecting them to take some responsibility, due to the cap.

The state should not have to pay for your children.

I agree it should be minimum wage for at least 3m. Consider yourself fortunate to be in a position to save for children and prepare for your future. Few people have that luxury

I sort of agree even though it's not very fair? The current system does pretty much penalise you for being the breadwinner. I had to save about £4000 to go on maternity leave for 9 months, and my lower earning husband will have to take the unpaid last three months as Shared Parental Leave even though I'm still dealing with symptoms of a birth injury. Will have to hope ovaries can hold out for another couple of years to save for a second. I'm not bringing in megabucks - I'm a teacher and husband works in admin.

Maybe this policy will change as the birth rate drops further? I'm mid 30s and only about 40% of my peer group have kids; I suspect most of my friends will never. Many are in same position as us- reasonable paying jobs but only recently managed to get on housing ladder as live in an expensive part of the South. No other huge outgoings.

I'm always baffled by how many women turn around and say they can't afford to go back to work after having a baby. Unless you only earn about £1.2k after tax, and your partner earns two or three times more than you? Maybe that is the norm...

Maybe I should have spent more time pushing my husband into better paying work? Not really the message we give young girls but maybe it should be

I would hazard that you are well beyond middle class if your household income is at least 600k- you're in the top 0.5% at least

Is it shockingly low? Yes. Should higher earners get more? No of course not. Way to penalise lower earners even more!

Their costs would be lower? You might be able to afford a bigger mortgage but as far as I’m aware, lower earners don’t get free utilities. Sainsburys doesn’t rock up on a Saturday morning with a delivery van full of food so that the poor people can help themselves to what they need. Clark’s don’t hand out free shoes to anyone who looks a bit skint. Why do you think that you’d be living to the limit of your £3000 a month salary but a lower earner would only need to use £700 of their £1300 salary?

For years I always assumed that you needed to be really intelligent and on the ball to get a high paying job. Clearly not.

Little Miss Entitled is back

I'm in agreement here as well, I'm also a FTM and now gross pickup on SMP is less than half of what I have paid in tax over the past 10+ years, plus as you quite rightly said I will have no entitlement to child benefit etc. I do agree that if you're in the 40% tax bracket it should be reflected in some proportion of your SMP.

Maternity pay is crap and should be boosted for everyone. All well and good saying save money, income pooled with partners but how many threads do we see on here of people feeling trapped. Pushed into abortion because can't afford after partner left, trapped on maternity leave with a partner that's cheated or is abusive because they can't afford to leave on SMP. Having a child should not make a women dependent on the goodwill and ability of her partner to cover everything. SMP would reduce my wage to 30% - thats a hard gap to save up to fill. All well and good to say find employers with better maternity pay - but then those employers may not be able to take the burden and reduce it or go back to stop employing women they think could get pregnant soon.

Women have to save to be able to have a child. Women become dependent on their partners. Women are disadvantaged because they may leave on maternity pay. It's all only disadvantaging women the current system.

SMP is pretty shockingly poor as currently stands and I'd be in favour of reviewing it so that the amount is more commensurate with the actual cost of living - perhaps in line with minimum wage?

But I disagree that it should mirror the wages of the recipient - it's difficult to see how this would be sustainable in a system which is so squeezed already. I'm the higher earner and have deliberately stayed in a job with a good occupational maternity package (six months full pay) so that we can have a second child. If I didn't have that available, we probably wouldn't have a second - this is a choice I'm seeing a lot of people making because massive childcare costs means saving for a second just isn't an option in the way that saving for a first is.

I disagree with your proposal OP as mainly it is large organisations that would benefit from this and the government shouldn’t be helping large organisations earn even more profits.

I’m a high earner and had full pay for 12 months. Most of my friends who are also high earners had the same or similar. Certainly I don’t know anyone who has to rely on statutory pay from 6 weeks. Imagine the cost to the government of having to pick up the bill for all the high earning women on six salaries?

What the government should do is force companies to make their maternity/paternity leave policies public information. This would allow women (and men) to vote with their feet and put pressure on all companies to provide competitive family benefits. After all, it’s the employers who are making money from our hard work and therefore it is the employers who should give back to us when we need it.

Agreed that visibility up-front on maternity and paternity leave policies would be a vary useful tool - I know a few people who have been considering moves where this would have been an important factor to them but no-one wants to ask about it in an interview because that's a great way to not get the job.

This - and if its based on prior earnings, whats to stop the company artificially inflating the pay for X months and then Employee gets a better deal than anyone else (obviously fraud, but how to police)

Oh do behave

Jealousy?

I get why it feels like that OP, I think it’s an instinctive response as your outgoings are likely higher when you’re on a higher salary (mortgage etc). However it would be grossly unfair for tax payers to fund higher earners more than lower earners. The state doesn’t owe you the ability to maintain your higher living standards if you choose to have children. We put money aside to allow us to take additional time out. I work for a tiny company so only get statutory and it’s really difficult.

However I strongly believe statutory maternity & parental pay should be higher for everyone. Children are literally our future as they will be the tax payers funding our pensions one day. The unpaid labour of child rearing can no longer be ignored as women are now part of the work place. It benefits all of society to have well cared for children. The current rates of child poverty in this country are shocking and will negatively impact all of us, now and for decades to come.

Unfortunately our economy has been monumentally screwed up by failed tory austerity, brexit, the war in Ukraine, covid, Truss & Kwarteng’s shocking economic vandalism, government corruption and short termism. I can’t see anything improving any time soon. First step is to get the tories out.

If everyone downsized their homes so that they could save up for maternity leave, then people would be then complaining that the prices of starter homes have gone up.

It seems rather a broken Britain if those who you think should be well off due to their income cannot afford the things that you expect them to be able to afford.