Sharing Shared Parental Leave

[squirey]

Hi. I work in the public sector and have started a conversation about whether we can share contractual maternity pay across other local public sector organisations, to support shared parental leave. This could work by enabling the mother to return to work and then 'transferring' her remaining contractual maternity pay to her partner, who may be working in another public sector organisation. This means they could benefit from shared parental leave without giving up contractual maternity pay.
Some questions for mumsnet:

• Would this encourage you and your partner to use shared parental leave?
• Would you and your partner consider relocating to an area that offered this?
• How would this alter your view of your employer if they were to offer it?

Many thanks for any help you can give!

As a dad who took 6 months additional paternity leave (without occupational paternity pay) this sounds great.

I work for a large multi-national tech firm which has excellent maternity pay but no paternity pay. It amazes me that they can get away with this kind of discrimination - effectively telling mums that the employer would prefer them to stay away for 12 months instead of sharing leave with the father. I don't see how we can expect true equality in career opportunities for women while this kind of discrimination continues.

In my case my wife's employer didn't offer occupational maternity pay so there was no financial impact caused by sharing leave, but otherwise I would have been much less likely to take shared leave.