What is the most regressive benefit? There is a fair bet that it is maternity pay.

The current system is broken for two reasons.  Every year the state spends over two billion pounds on statutory maternity pay.  Fair enough, except that a large chunk of that goes on paying women a full 90 per cent of their salary for the first six weeks of maternity leave, regardless of whether they’re earning millions or on minimum wage.  So the state is paying some (rich) mums much more than other (poor) ones.  Meanwhile fathers get an even worse deal.  They receive only two weeks pay, at a maximum of £123.09 per week.

So what should politicians do instead?

To tackle the first problem, the current 90 per cent of salary for parental pay could be capped.  We already cap redundancy packages at£380 per week, a level not far below the average weekly wage.  Doing this would still leave a discrepancy between the benefits given to wealthy and poor mums, but the money saved from cutting out the subsidy to the highest earning women’s wages could be put towards a higher statutory level of pay for all.

Secondly, to tackle the raw deal for dads, statutory maternity pay could be changed to statutory parental pay, splitting the entitlement currently only available to mothers between both parents, and permitting one parent to transfer part or all of their allocation to the other.  This would allow parents to share both the pleasure of spending time with their child and the possible damage to their careers that results from taking the time off.

This solution will make employers of high earners squeal, as they may feel obliged to keep up their employee’s current generous maternity pay but are no longer able to claim the money back from HMRC.  They may also complain about the damage to their bottom line caused by not only mothers but, (gasp!) fathers too taking large chunks of time off.

Tough.  Young children need their parents around. Those first few months are key to later development and ultimately a person’s contribution to society.  The state should support parents in taking time off work to be with their children at this crucial time. The current system limits fathers from being with their children, gives far too little support to women on low incomes, whilst costing a fortune to boost the income of big earners.  After years of fighting for better employment rights for women in the name of equality, it is about time that resulted in actual equality too – for rich and poor, mum and dad.

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