To think statutory maternity pay should be the same amount as the state pension?

[BridgertonToBe]

I don’t have children, probably never will. But I do think SMP is shockingly low, and if the government is really worried about the birth rate they should look at this.

Many women on maternity only get SMP and no enhanced package from their employer. It’s current set at a maximum of £187.18 a week for 39 weeks. If mothers want to be off for 52, it will be unpaid.

The new state pension is £230.25 a week. While those on maternity may have a partner to support them, they probably won’t have any other income while many pensioners also have a private pension alongside the SP.

AIBU to think that if £230.25 is needed by all pensioners over 66 for a basic standard of living (who probably have less outgoings than a young family), SMP should be the same?

If we can afford to pay the state pension to every pensioner for the rest of their lives out of NI, we can afford to support new working mothers birthing and raising the next generation of workers for a short amount of time. The financial hit is a big deterrent for people having children. I also think SMP should be paid from birth until the child’s first birthday.

The whole world needs less people.

Falling birth rates means there will be a period where older populations will dominate and it will be difficult but then over time it will readjust.

Healthy life expectancy is very relevant. Among my family all my older relatives lived their last few years unhealthily except one Uncle of mine and DH great uncle and they literally dropped dead in their 80’s. It doesn’t just apply to the old either an example is anyone who developed diabetes used to just die young.

Modern medicine is assisting in making the world a worse place if you think beyond the emotion of people dying but most can’t or don’t want to do this.

But it just becomes all very much a big intergenerational squabble about who uses what resources and how those resources were amassed or distributed all affected by legislation of the time.

I don’t understand that. Both my husband and me are retired. We both have private pensions.

But we have both had a letter saying we will receive the full state pension when we’re 67.

Him in August 2029 and me in November 2030.

I think there’s a lot of truth in this.

The inter generational squabbling about who has it hardest is completely and utterly pointless. There are benefits and challenges of living through any generation.

I’m well aware that my dd is having a far harder time getting on the property ladder than I did. But when she does, she’ll likely never have the disaster of living through interest rates that were routinely far higher than nowadays, and hitting 15% at one point. Quite frankly there were many times that dh and I utterly regretted having been able to get a 100% mortgage. Once negative equity hit, dh and I wished to god we’d just stayed in rented.

and if my dd decides to have a baby, she’ll get the option of a full year off work, 9 months of it paid, also the option of transferable leave with her partner (who will also have had paternity leave) plus subsidised childcare when she returns. She knows that’s a far better deal than juggling a 12 week old breastfed child with returning to work and having to pay full childcare costs as I did with her.

swings and roundabouts.

@Drdogooder SMP is still covered by the state and is reclaimable, for small business you get back more than paid out to cover some of the pension/ER's NI contributions. SSP is the only once which has to be funded by businesses.

Auto-enrollment for the smallest employers began in 2018.

My point was that not all pensioners receive the full state pension. I don't (for whatever reason) and neither does my husband (for whatever reason). In fact, the proportion of pensioners currently receiving the full state pension is between 50% and 51%. This is what makes using the full amount as a basis for your argument both wrong and pointless.

To correct another point you made, not everyone who doesn't receive the full state pension can apply for or get pension credit so, again, not every pensioner by any means, receives the full £230 per week.

Yes but the point is there must be reasons and being married or having a private pension aren’t the reasons.

Does your husbands private pension plus the state pension equal more than £12570? If so he’ll be paying tax on the difference.

With you, you might not have had the qualifying contributions or made the “small stamp” when you were working.

You also maybe getting the old state pension rather than the new one.

Less generous than what? The point of it was an attempt to ensure that everyone was building a pension. Many companies did not offer pensions at that time, particularly to junior people. How can a pension be less generous than no pension?

It will be interesting to see if you do. There are so many young people on here who think pensioners get too much, seem to be under the illusion that all pensioners are loaded and think we should get rid of the triple lock. Young people should be fighting to the death for the triple lock to ensure you get the same benefits that older people get now. If you don't then it's your own fault.

They can fight all they want. The money won't be there!

Indeed, OP is clearly a rage-baiting ageist like about 80% of the people on this thread. That's fine on Mumsnet though so.....

And I wish they'd shut the (constant) fuck up about how hard young people have it without qualifying it in any way. ALL of my friends kids have managed to buy houses themselves and have fulfilling jobs but then, they don't aspire to live in Chelsea

Yes, she hasn’t done a very good job of disguising her real agenda

Again, missing the point! This thread isn't a discussion of why I/we don't get full state pension. My quibble is with the OP's assertion that all pensioners get £230.52 per week, which is what she has based her argument on. As I said before, only 50 - 51% of people of state pension age receive the full amount. That obviously means that 49 - 50% don't.

I agree with you OP! The declining birth rate is an issue and I think those who don’t acknowledge that will be in for a shock further down the line. I think the financial element is one of the biggest reasons for it. Although there are other factors which we did consider before having children. But personally for us, the financial impact was our biggest consideration. Currently on maternity leave and it’ll be a good 6 months to a year of me working full time to recover financially. And we’re in Wales so don’t get the subsidised childcare from 9 months.

But then you're entitled to a gateway benefit which is worth more.

I’ve had 2 kids, I think SMP is not bad. What do people really expect they should be getting paid when they aren’t at work? It’s a lot more than SSP, and people can’t generally plan/save for sickness like they can pregnancy.

we don’t want to grow the population any faster as we can’t cope with homes and hospitals -that makes i think “give potential mummies money” is predicated on “ we need to grow the white population to make up for the fact that when we kick out the undesirables we will have shafted our country and will be desperate short of workers “

it’s racism

Sorry for trying to help. Lesson learned.

Honestly, these thinly disguised ageist posters are getting tiresome.

whatever generation you’re born into will have upsides and downsides. The irony of the OP linking SMP with the state pension….. does she not realise that today’s ‘wealthy’ OAPs are the ones who got barely anything in the way of SMP and were returning to work with 3 month old babies. Paying full childcare. And exorbitant mortgage rates.

Perhaps it’s natural that the younger generation want to believe those who came before them had it better. I’ve even had occasions when my own adult kids have moaned a bit about student debt and told me how lucky I was to get a grant. I just remind them that only 7% of the population went to university when I did, and that no one swanned off on a gap year, it was unheard of for students to own cars and a
night out was a cheap beer in the student union.

i’m well aware that some aspects of my life as a 20/30 year old were better than for my children. Housing in particular is a real concern and I fully support affordable housing and schemes to help the younger generation get on the ladder.

but I’m equally aware that they’ve had access to opportunities, travel etc which were absolutely out of reach for young people when I was in my 20s. I’m also acutely aware that the maternity provision my dd will get if she had a child is massively better than my generation had.

I wish people would get a bit of perspective rather than constantly berating those of us who’ve done nothing wrong, just grown older and worked for 40 years!

Great post!

I agree there are upsides and downsides to whenever you’re born, but not just that, it can also be due to circumstances. But that doesn’t mean things can’t be changed or improved just because one generation did or didn’t get some things. Lots of things were crap for women in the old days, legally and financially, which is why women have fought for improvements for the future.

Student loans and university loans etc is another kettle of fish. University education was less accessible to all but the brightest in the past, but not going and getting a job was seen as perfectly acceptable. Young people now have been led to believe they need university to get a job, but who really understands what they’re signing up for with these loans at 18.

Not all young people in the UK need to pay Uni fees.

I do get where you’re coming from and I would rather that the money used for free nursery for babies was used to help parents to enable one of them to stay at home for longer.

I had to go back to work when my youngest was 18 weeks, breast fed and wouldn’t take a bottle under any circumstance. It was so stressful.

Long story short, I found a cup he would tolerate (still have it and he’s now 30).

BUT, I worked 2.5 days a week for 10 years and my children were looked after by my parents and my husband’s parents on those days.

So I think the money used to pay for 9 month old babies to be in nursery, should just be given to a parent who wants to do their own “child care”.

Leave pensioners out of it.

I so agree, I'm absolutely sick to death of hearing younger generations whine all the time about how hard they think they have it, when in fact they're the most spoilt, privilaged generations with the most oppotunities at their finger tips, to ever exist. Do they face struggls, yes, just like every other generation that went before them.

But lets not forget all the youth that got killed in the wars that would have continued to work and contribute to the system or people that died in the bombing but didn't get to live to claim a pension.

We can all come out with tales like this. The two points i,e maternity pay and pensions are just not comparable from a policy or practicality point of view. Do we really need to morally take one section of society down to raise another?

Make a stand alone case, on ground of affordability why those on maternity leave on lower incomes should get more help and I think most people would wholeheartedly support you!

There have always been families with one high earner so they can afford to have a stay at home parent and then there have always been those on the breadline that struggle to provide the basics and its the same for pensioners.

The official Pensioners’ Incomes report shows that pensioner income varies widely and is shaped by decades of policy changes, work patterns, and regional inequality. It does not support the idea of a uniformly wealthy older generation.
Averages can be misleading — a small minority with high private pensions or property wealth pulls the numbers up, while many others live on modest fixed incomes.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/pensioners-incomes-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2024/pensioners-incomes-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2024?utm_source=copilot.com

The report emphasises that year‑to‑year changes are often not statistically significant, meaning the “big jumps” in pension people imagine simply aren’t there!

I'm not going to lie as wealth does tend to peak about retirement age for those that have had a mortgage and private pensions etc as you have been working towards it all your life. But most pensioners are asset rich not cash rich - yes there are exceptions but the statistics show its not the norm and these pension assets start to diminish as soon as you start drawing on them and its OK having a nice mortgage free house if your pension allows you to heat it and cover any repairs etc as there will be no other money coming in, you won't get a pay review/bonus etc.

Regional inequality is huge: median wealth in the South East is £157,000 higher than in the North East. It may be harder to get on the housing ladder down there but the long term rewards and options are way more significant.

I will also accept that younger people today face:

• Higher housing costs
• Higher student debt
• Lower job security
• Stagnant wages
• Higher private pension expectations
• Higher lifestyle expectations.

Meanwhile, many Boomers:

• Bought homes when prices were lower relative to income but society didn't expect lower income families to own homes - there ahs been a societal change
• Some lucky ones benefited from final‑salary pensions (now rare)
• Had more stable employment conditions

But this doesn’t mean all Boomers benefited equally — far from it.

A more balanced way to see it

The data supports a much more nuanced truth: Some older people accumulated wealth due to historical economic conditions but it is not universal — and many pensioners live modestly or in poverty.

Younger generations face structural disadvantages that fuel frustration but blaming individuals or entire generations doesn’t reflect the actual evidence.

State your case for improvements in financial support for people on maternity leave and I will support you but try compare to pensioners - no - its an entirely different problem set.

Well this is timely. I’ve had a letter today informing me of an increase in my state pension. I have a tiny work pension so there’ll also be a tax increase. I’ll probably get tuppence extra.