It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) for whom I am full of admiration. When we first arrived in Parliament, I remember wondering whether any MP had fought their first parliamentary seat so heavily pregnant. I do not think so.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) on her work on this issue. She is right to highlight the issues that underpin this petition. Many of them have been drawn to my attention by an organisation in my constituency, Healthwatch West Berkshire. It touched on points including and most importantly the challenges facing new mothers during lockdown––I will define that as between March and July 2020––such as not being able to see close members of their family, meet their National Childbirth Trust groups if they were in one, or go to a family or children’s centre. The support that we would wish for new mothers was not there.
I would like to confine myself to the proposal in this petition, which is the right to extend paid maternity leave by a further three months to enable bonding and social engaging with other parents and babies through baby groups. I am not going to support the petition, and I shall set out why and what else I think should be done. The first reason is that I am not persuaded that this is the purpose of maternity leave. To look at the statutory purpose we have to delve back into European law. The pregnant workers directive was what kicked off the idea of maternity leave in 1992. Its essence was the wellbeing of the mother. It was about mandating member states to offer 14 weeks for the mother to make a physical recovery from childbirth. In 2009, the European Union looked at it again, and came up with firm recommendations that member states should offer 18 weeks; in fact, it recommended 24. It said that longer leave would have a positive impact on a mother’s health, and that its priority was to help women recover from giving birth and to create a solid relationship with their child.
Maternity leave, I say very respectfully, does not and has never existed for wider developmental purposes, and we should be wary about asking for it to do so, particularly in this country, where women have a statutory
right to 52 weeks’ ordinary plus additional maternity leave. I fully accept the extreme limitations that were imposed by the lockdown, but the reality was that that would not have been the entirety of any woman’s maternity leave. To the extent that childcare provision and other services are still limited, I am not persuaded that their offering would radically change if we were to change the period by three months until Christmas, or even into the new year.
My other point is that I am very worried about mothers asking for a further three months’ maternity leave, knowing how vulnerable they are in the workplace. In my experience—I used to be an employment barrister—employers would find that an onerous requirement. While they may not make a woman redundant while she is on leave or even when she has recently returned, if she is caught in a redundancy exercise, say at the back end of 2021, she will find it very difficult to establish causation in an employment tribunal. I am concerned about that.
As to what the Government should do—and the conclusion I reached after 10 years of practice—I think the way to protect, enhance and progress women in the workplace is to embed flexible working practices. We have seen through this crisis how productive and effective people can be through doing their jobs at home. We have seen men doing it for the first time in jobs they never would have thought they could do from home. We have recalibrated our view of flexible working, which can also mean working reduced hours, flexi-working and job shares. My view is that the answer is not in extending statutory leave, but in embedding statutory flexibility in the workplace.