Shared parental leave disappointment

[Benzalkonium]

Hi, just posting to see if anyone has experience of this and can tell me if it sounds righ or wrong, (and also to whine a bit)

We were hoping it might be possible for my partner to take the last few weeks of my maternity leave as shared parental leave. It looked like his employer offered a good deal for dads in the policy: 14 weeks on full pay. Hr have just told us that the full pay offer only applies to the first 14 weeks of my maternity leave.
We can't see where it says this in the policy.
What are other peoples experiences?

It's so unrealistic to think that I am going to offer my partner the first 14 weeks of my maternity leave! Why can't he have the last few weeks, when baby doesn't need my physical presence so much?

So disappointed.

Technically, don't you 'end' maternity leave (with your company scheme) to move on to parental leave (which is usually SMP only unless the company enhance it)?

39 weeks of maternity leave and SMP drops after 6 weeks. Any shared leave would be on the remaining 33 weeks of this rate?

So the OP would be ending her maternity leave on week 31, then yes there are only 8 weeks of SMP left. For Salty, once she comes off her company scheme (which she'd need to do to move on to shared leave) then SMP kicks in hence the lack of full pay.

Interestingly our hr dept told me some big companies are offering different maternity pay vs parental leave pay. This is because having carefully considered it they find it harder to recruit males or females, or harder to retain them, and therefore they offer different incentives. And it's gone through a court case and been okayed.

Sorry op, I think you're being a bit optimistic. A female at your dp's co would get the first 14w paid in full and then 25w smp, then nothing. He is effectively diving in at week 31, so he gets whatever they would get at that point in their mat leave.

Salty we're in the situation you describe.

My employer doesn't offer any enhanced maternity package at all, so just SMP.

DH's employer has a cracking maternity package, not sure what exactly, but it's something like full pay for 6 months and then half for 6, I'm not entirely sure. Better than SMP anyway.

For SPL, they only offer statutory pay.

We've gone for it anyway because we earn roughly the same, so whichever of us is off work we'd have one full time wage and one lot of statutory pay. It sucks though and it does make me very cross.

Apparently it's not discrimination because it is a different type of leave (or legislation or whatever). A woman on SPL would be paid statutory minimum, as would a man, so apparently that makes it ok. (DH actually works with a woman who decided to take full maternity rather than SPL as it meant she'd have to give up her enhanced maternity - she had been intended to come back to work for a few weeks to help out with a big project).

Legally they're right, but morally I think it's a shit move.

ughnotagain do you know if you still get the first 6 weeks of SMP at 90%? Sounds like we are in pretty much an identical situation but I did read if you take SPL then you don't get those 6 enhanced weeks (either sex).

It is a completely different scheme. You can be on maternity/paternity leave or shared parental leave. Not both at the same time! One lot of leave/financial benefit shared between two parents. Not maternity leave with paternity leave tacked on to the end which would be two lots of leave/financial benefit.

Salty not sure tbh. I took maternity leave to begin with, so I got the 90% for the first 6 weeks. I took 27 weeks maternity leave, then ended it, and DH is taking 10 weeks as SPL.

I think I wasn't very clear on my post earlier. I was disappointed to not get ANY period above statutory minimum pay. My employer pays the minimum, and DH's employer pays something like full salary for 3 months, 50% of salary for the next 3 months and then going down to statutory minimum for the final 6 months.

Since I am the woman and therefore went on leave first (for recovery and breastfeeding purposes) we have been on statutory minimum the whole time. So DH sees none of the benefit he would do if he were female at his company. (My company is at least equally rubbish to both men and women).

You've misunderstood how it works.

If you take off weeks 1-30
You get paid what your company pays for weeks 1-30

Your partner takes off weeks 31-40
He gets paid what his company pays for weeks 31-40
Not what his company would pay for weeks 1-10. Because they are not weeks 1-10. They are weeks 31-40.

If he got paid as if they were weeks 1-10, then all the companies in the UK would be paying out much much more in parental pay and might have to revise their policies (to be less generous) in order to afford this.

This rule didn't say that companies had to pay out more, just that they had to be fairer about allowing it to be divided between parents.

trills has said what I was going to say, but she put it much more clearly.

Can you imagine th cost and the disruption if every father was taking 14 weeks paid leave as well as women being on mat leave

Easter you must have known what your company mat leave policy was though? You could compare it to any company! Trills has it right, the OP wanted to take all her leave and then her partner to start from week 1 with his pay! The birth is the trigger point.

What about single parents who don't have a partner, it wouldn't be fair on them if you and your partner took consecutive paid maternity/paternity leave. They'd get a lot less money!

I am afraid you were expecting a bigger cake.

Trills explains very clearly. Sometimes an example helps too.

Imagine a couple both work for the same employer and the employer offers six months at full pay. Whether one of them takes the whole leave or there is some split, you should expect six months of pay. What you are expecting is effectively that one partner can take six months at full pay and then swap and the other partner get another six months of full pay, doubling the take home to a year just by sharing the leave.

But is birth the trigger point? Or is my starting leave?
The problem is that my dp's policy does not say that there is a trigger point, just that he is entitled to 14 weeks on full pay.

It seems that as the pay on top of statutory is discretionary, there are lots of different ways companies can make it work. It sounds fairly standard that there is a trigger point which means men can only get full pay if they do it very early in the baby's life.

Again, i wonder if anyone who works in hr would care to look at my partners policy and point out to me where it says there is a trigger point. Because I can't find that clause.

But that is how it is being interpreted.

Have you tried asking his HR department? That would be the obvious next step.

Well, it might not specify a trigger point, but it might say something like "first 14 weeks at x% of pay" and so on.

I don't think you're going to get round it on a technicality, what they are doing is normal practice, and (IMO) perfectly fair.

Fizrim, yes I knew my company's maternity leave policy but the shared leave stuff is relatively new and still needs some ironing out.

If DH could have taken the first six months and then switched to me taking the second six months, we would have been thousands better off, but this is not allowed under the current legislation.

That's not double cake, it's just the scheme his employer has in place (supposedly for men too, but in reality they will rarely have a man that can recieve the higher pay portion of it). And as a result it remains better to employ men of child-having age than women.

Ughnotagain: Legally they're right, but morally I think it's a shit move.

Yes. That.

It's frustrating. There is meant to be this new legislation that will make things more equal for men and women, but all the HR policies I know of have been written to give men (in reality) none or few of the benefits they would get if they gave birth and went on leave first.

They all sound good and fair on paper. But in reality, not equal at all.

I'm doing 6 months and dh then taking over for 3 months. Like you we read his works poxy as he would get full pay for the first 13 weeks but he won't, as I'm getting that from my work. So he's getting SMP pay for 13 weeks as I would.
Realistically we can't expect both companies to top up. I believe I could forgo some of my salary 'top up' for him but I earn more so little point.

We were an early couple on the old maternity/additional parental leave, when we realised that if we both worked for DH's employers we'd be financially disadvantaged as DH taking weeks 26-40 (or whatever) would only be on smp, but I'd have had enhanced pay. Luckily I work for an employer which offers generous enhanced maternity pay, but only up to week 26.

Getting my head around it for this bite of the cherry (I'm going til week 30, then DH starts and will probably go to week 45/50). But there still doesn't seem to be an appropriate way of addressing annual leave. I'll have about four weeks annual leave I'd like to tack on to the end of my 30 weeks. There seems no point in DH starting at week 31 on smp when he could work for another four weeks on full pay but this interrupts the continuous flow of leave which definitely removes your eligibility to smp but probably to the whole spl altogether. I'm quite happy to sacrifice 5 weeks of smp (as we'd be earning more in weeks 30-34) but not to the whole concept of spl.

Hi Jenijena. Yes, rather awkwardly that is how annual leave works. So I had a lovely 4 weeks of compulsory, fully-paid holiday while DH started on parental leave. That part of the system isn't ideal. But it's a good time to book in some Keeping In Touch days as your partner can look after the baby (and you can take those days as holiday later in the year).

I think a lot of employers would let you spread out the holidays a bit though so you wouldn't necessarily have to take them all as a block (although I gather taking most at the end of your leave is generally strongly encouraged).

Rather awkwardly, I think there are two separate issues here.

The first is that companies are offering different policies for men and women. So women get maternity leave, and men get shared parental leave, and they can (legally, I assume) offer different for both. So a man might work at a company where a woman would get 90% pay for 20 weeks, but he only gets SMP from week 4. This is unfair and unequal.

However, a lot of people seem to be confusing the issues and think that they can just get two lots of full payment - that a woman takes weeks 1-20 of her maternity pay, and a man also takes weeks 1-20 of his 'maternity' pay. Which means they could be getting a lot of money, and the cost to the economy would be huge. And I agree with Trills, the knock on effect would be employers reducing their whole maternity package to try and save money.

I do know quite a few people though who think they will be getting two lots of full maternity pay by splitting the leave. I wonder what's going wrong with the message that people think this?

This is quite clear. It certainly makes it clear that it's not shared maternity leave, it's shared parental leave. Which is an entirely different thing.

If DH could have taken the first six months and then switched to me taking the second six months, we would have been thousands better off, but this is not allowed under the current legislation.

I don't quite get this. You could have done that under the new law.

As far as I can gather from your other posts, what you mean is that you didn't want to go this route for bfing and physical recovery. And yes, I get that it's kind of unfair that the pay tends to weighted towards the start of leave, when many women want to be the ones who are off. But that isn't the same as not being able to, is it? Or have I missed a technicality of the changes?

Thurlow - I agree. People are complaining because they want the pay Company A offers (the mother's employer) and the pay Company B offers (the father's employer).

But Company A and Company B will both have costed their packages based on only 50% of their workforce (if it is balanced, more or less if it is skewed) who become new parents being able to take the package. If that suddenly becomes 100% of new parents, the cost of enhanced pay has doubled and they will cut their cloth accordingly.

I get that it can work out hard for families where the mother's enhanced pay is shit but the fathers would be good if he could take leave from day 1. But that's not the same as it being fair that everyone can take both pots of money. For a start, it would be horribly unfair on single parents.