My Lords, we have moved on to Part 6 which has been greatly anticipated on my side of the House and, I am sure, with equal enthusiasm and excitement by my friend the Minister. We have a substantial number of amendments to get through and I know there is pressure on all sides to try and complete this within the time. We will do what we can to achieve that but there are still some very important issues that we want to pick up and I make no excuse if we spend some time debating them. Having said that, I reassure the Minister that, by and large, the Opposition are very pleased to see many of the measures that are proposed in these parts of the Bill. We have comments for discussion and we will do our obvious constitutional duty to scrutinise those things that are there, but we are not making major objections to them. We seek to refine, occasionally to add and perhaps to probe the Government a bit more on some of the reasons why things do not appear as we would like them to. I am also grateful to the Minister for allowing us a chance to talk to him and the Bill team which was very useful.
Amendment 266AZA would ensure that there is flexibility in the legislation for exceptional circumstances. The purpose is to ensure that if children need to be looked after in exceptional circumstances, the parental leave enabled by the substantive clauses can be allocated to someone else such as a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle or even the father if he would not ordinarily qualify.
It does not take much to imagine how devastating exceptional circumstances could be. It may be that the mother becomes incapacitated, very ill or even dies in childbirth, or that there is some other complication such as a late-pregnancy stillbirth—something that my mother suffered—that will require urgent and immediate assistance but also longer-term assistance over the period covered by the shared parental leave. At present they would be able to take only a limited amount of time—almost certainly unpaid time off for dependants—if indeed it were granted by their employer.
Similarly, there may be circumstances in couple families where the mother is unwell but the father does not qualify for shared leave to care for the new baby. The Bill should make provision for exceptional circumstances when shared parental leave and pay could be transferred in such difficult and, as I have said, exceptional circumstances. Surely we ought to be doing everything that we can to support families in these circumstances.
We had a previous meeting with the Minister in which we had a brief discussion on this point, and I have read the response of his honourable friend in the other place. I understand that he may feel that the amendment could distract from the main thrust of the Bill and that his initial position may be that the Government do not expect parties who are not parents or partners to share parental leave. I also fully understand, to anticipate other amendments due to come up shortly, that the Government do not want to weaken the engagement of fathers in raising their children. We accept that there is strong evidence that the early engagement of fathers in caring for their children leads to positive outcomes for children. However, the amendment is really about exceptional circumstances, already outlined, in which other statutory provisions may just not work or, if they did work, would not be sufficient, as in the case of a late stillborn child, where of course by definition shared leave cannot be invoked.
If Government cannot accept this amendment—although I hope that they will—perhaps the Minister will acknowledge that they might consider using the provision under the new sections in the Bill to make regulations for these sorts of extenuating circumstances. I beg to move.