Shared Parental leave - enhanced pay and taking co-current leave

[Ihatemyselfmore]

Hi - trying to work out best options for me and my husband - last time I just took full maternity leave of 12 months. It’s our second child and we want to do things differently as we will have two kids and no family support.

I work for the Civil Service which offers maternity leave at 6 months fully paid, 3 months stat and 3 months unpaid. Our shared parental leave pay is less generous. My husband works for the nhs and his Shared Parental pay is 6 weeks full pay and 18 weeks half pay.

my husband earns double the amount of pay than me, and we rely on his salary for our household.

i was hoping to take 6 months maternity leave at full pay, towards the end of this 6 months give notice to curtail my maternity leave and start shared parental leave (you can end maternity leave and start shared parental leave at any point during your maternity leave by giving 8 weeks official notice).

At the end of the 6 months, my husband would take a months shared parental leave at full pay (in line with his shared parental leave policy pay policy). We would take this time off co-currently, so we could be both off together, but I would reduce my overall leave by a month, and would have a month less statutory pay.

I.e : I would take 6 months maternity leave and 5 months shared parental leave and for this I would be paid 6 months full pay, two months stat and three months no pay (1 month less stat pay and 1 month less leave than I would get if I took the full 12 months maternity in line with our policy). My husband would have his two weeks parental leave once the baby is born and after 6 months would have a month shared parental leave at full pay where we would be off together. Does this make sense? Does anyone foresee any issues before I discuss this with my employer?

Thanks for any help

I would use up the accrued leave to have that month together personally. Depends how soon you have to use it up (I had three months to use up accrued leaveand went back part time, but then also had my regular leave available).

I did six months at full pay, a month at statutory pay, then partner did five months at full pay (shared parental leave). We did month 11 as holiday for me so we were both off together.

I don’t think this would work - my husband can’t use his annual leave to cover the period as it would take pretty much all of his annual leave and we need it at other points of the year for various reasons. The only way I could take annual leave is at the end of my maternity/shared parental leave period which would be late autumn and when my youngest starts primary school and we planned to do something all together as a family, so needs to be earlier in the year.

Will he get the enhanced pay regardless of when he takes shared parental? Sometimes the first 6 months means the first 6 months from when baby is born, not from whenever you take the leave.

Hmmm it has the following clause which I don’t think is very clear:

“The maximum entitlement will only apply where either parent has not already received statutory or occupational maternity pay, maternity allowance or statutory or occupational adoption pay. Where pay (excluding pay during the compulsory two-week maternity/adoption leave period) has already been received by either parent, the maximum joint entitlement set out below will reduce by the equivalent amount.”

How I would interpret this (as someone who works in HR - but doesn’t deal with pay/leave) is you can’t have 6 weeks full pay, 18 weeks half pay and 13 weeks Statutory Shared Parental Leave Pay if your partner has exceeded this amount (because it’s shared and not on top of your partners pay and time off) and it will be reduced by however much your partner takes - but does not say the reduction will start from the full pay element, and nothing about having to start leave within a certain period. So if I reduce my leave and stat pay by a month I would assume my partner would have 4 weeks full pay, but not the rest of the entitlement as that is not available due to my leave and pay.

Does this make sense?

Sorry that was in response to @SummerIce

Misread the thread sorry!

I see your point, it’s not completely clear and that’s the issue with shared parental - they never explain it properly!

Both DH and I are in the private sector, but if he took shared parental during the first 6 months, he would have had full pay. As it happened he took it later on so had no pay.

I’ve done some googling and it does seem to suggest that your husband won’t get the full pay once the 6 months are over.

https://onenhsfinance.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Parental-Leave-a-guide-for-employees-FINAL.pdf

The scenario that starts at the bottom of page 9 seems to similar to yours. Well it’s different but goes on to say that if wife took longer then the husband wouldn’t be entitled to the enhanced pay.

BUT please note I’m not an expert on this. I’m a lawyer and had to try and figured all this out when we did shared parental, and even I was confused by it all!

Yes I see what you are saying with that example and I think you are right that if that example applies what I suggested above would mean my partner would only receive stat pay. It doesn’t make sense for us to take cocurrently from the beginning as Shared Parental leave pay is much less generous than maternity pay where I work, so we would lose a lot more to gain that month for my partner. Very frustrating employers do this - leaves the burden of care on mothers and gives fathers very little time to bond with their child unless you are taking a greater financial hit (and there is a huge financial hit regardless) 🫠🫠 ahhh well

Yeah it’s really very frustrating. I guess it is a step in the right direction as a few years ago it wasn’t even a thing, but in an ideal world each parent should be able to take the time off without it affecting the other parent’s entitlements.

Your partner should speak to the HR department to check but everyone I know who has done shared parental leave and who get 6 months enhanced pay have had to do it with no pay if they took it after the initial 6 months. The only time someone got paid was when he worked somewhere that offered 9 months full pay.

Both me and my partner work for the same employer and we BOTH got six months enhanced pay, but could NOT take it concurrently! It's a complete mess.

Just a practical point - will you be breastfeeding? I had to go back at 7 months and since baby wasn't fully established on solids yet, I had to pump 3-4 times in a working day and it was awful. I had completely underestimated how incredibly hard work pumping would be. Each pumping session, including setup time and washing and drying, took 30 minutes, so that was almost 2 hours of my working day gone.

She's 9 months now and it's much easier as she's on 3 meals a day. With my second (if I get the courage to conceive a second 😅) I wouldn't try to go back until 9 months for this reason.

I was still breastfeeding when I went back at 12 months. Day one, I fully intended to pump so he can have breast milk at nursery as he was refusing cows milk.

Day two, I scrapped the idea. Figured he’s fine with water and meals for just a few days a week!

It is such a faff and I have huge respect for women who pump religiously to get supply up, because baby won’t latch, etc.

I could have wrote this myself - exactly the same experience with my first!

Haha I didn’t even entertain the thought with my second! I bought an Elvie when he was born thinking it would help me to pump more but even that was ambitious - I’ve used it maybe twice in 18 months!

We took SPL and DH works for NHS. Baby born December, I had dec - June and DH had May - Nov (we used a bit of holiday too). I took the unpaid bit as I only get SMP, DH used up the occupational ShPP.

The NHS wording isn’t great and it’s a bit complicated, you need to take as short a maternity leave as possible and convert it to SPL as the NHS deduct any weeks taken as mat leave from the occupational ShPP (so the max he can get is 6 weeks full pay if you only take 2 weeks mat leave). We didn’t realise this so I finished work the week before birth and as the two weeks after have to be mat leave we lost 3 weeks of the full pay. If I was doing it again I’d take holiday up to date of birth then do 2 weeks mat leave before converting to SPL and make sure DH has the maximum fully paid bit. It wasn’t too bad in the end as I worked so close to due date, but I’d have been annoyed if we’d lost more. You also get stat shared parental pay on top of the half pay with NHS.
The internal guidance says HR should give you calculations so I’d ask for these when you hand in the form to make sure it’s correct (we didn’t and it’s why we messed up a bit).

Thanks for this - really helpful. I think we are just going to have to take two weeks hol and two weeks unpaid parental leave for the month we wanted him to be off. In my CS department the shared parental leave pay is so much less generous than maternity pay, so I would end up losing about 4 months of full pay to allow my partner to have one months full pay, it just doesn’t make financial sense for us to curtail my maternity leave until my full pay expired, but at the point it expires my partner wouldn’t be entitled to any enhanced pay as part of his shared parental leave policy 😢 I appreciate I’m lucky to get 6 months full pay as it’s generous compared to a lot of work places, just frustrated the full care then falls to me as we can’t afford for my husband to take any significant time off unpaid - and my husband doesn’t get that bonding time with his child due to financial constraints 😢 (just further pushes the maternity gap in the workplace, and pushes women to be the primary carers with the impact on their career). I can’t even end my maternity early because since the free childcare extension as most nurseries and childminders have two year waitlists - to get my unborn baby into the same nursery as my first born (we only have one car and two drop offs would be really challenging with work start times) we had to pay a deposit whilst in our first trimester and the earliest time we could secure was winter 2026 🫠 Anyway just ranting now 😂🫠

I can’t speak to the technicalities as never did shared parental leave (Dh is self employed, so any leave is unpaid). But I would simply think about the practicalities. Does Dh being on parental leave from 6 months mean he’ll be doing all the night feeds and settling? Because sleep from 6-12 months was pretty rough with both of mine. I think I would have been pretty resentful of Dh if I was up feeding through the night and still having to get up at 5:30am to catch the train to work while he got a nice sleep and a day off.

I didn’t intend to go back to work as you can take shared parental leave at the same time, I just planned to reduce my leave by a month overall. But I don’t think it’s going to work. With my first we split the night time in half and I pumped to cover it (once the baby wasn’t cluster feeding constantly 🫠) so even when I was off and my husband was in work he would cover half the night - but my son had colic/silent reflux - so it was very stressful daytimes on my own and lots of night wakes so it always seemed fair, I’d have killed to go to work and escape the crying for 8 hours 😂 (I love my son to absolute bits but he cried a lot more than your average baby for the first 7-8 months of his life, bless him)

I've had to go back to work at 7 months and really thought that would mean some equality between me and DH (he does work full time too, no shared parental leave). My experience has been that I continue to be the primary carer. On top of breastfeeding and pumping which is honestly incredibly time consuming, separation anxiety and teething has meant baby only wants me (which was never the case before!! he used to settle really well with dad).

Because I am doing the night wake ups, I am more tired so at home more so DH goes to the gym, goes out etc (things I cannot bring myself to do but he may as well do it since I'm home anyway). So I also end up doing more of the weaning etc. I am still the expert in the baby.

It's only been 2 months and I am working at boundaries and getting DH more involved (sometimes I hang around work an extra 30 minutes as DH has the baby and I know if I step in the house, I have to take him off his hands).

Before having this baby, I was all about shared parental leave and equality etc. But now the reality is small babies just want their mum and I don't think I would be OK with DH being at home while I'm at work so then I can come home and still do all the caring and feeding.

Oh and mine was a brilliant sleeper 5-7 months. Again, teething plus separation anxiety totally ruined it.

That sounds really hard work, I’m sorry. I’ve been quite lucky that mine has always been happy to be comforted by either me or my husband - well, to be honest, it was me at first but we persevered with my husband comforting him even if it took a bit longer, as he was up every single hour screaming for the first 6 months of his life, and still regular wake ups for much longer than that and I (personally) couldn’t do it alone. I think because of that he is really comfortable to be comforted by either of us. TBH now I’m pregnant it’s prob more his dad as his dad can still pick him up and match his energy whilst I’m already waddling around with awful lower back pain 😂❤️🫠