It's time to end parental poverty says mother left suicidal by financial strain

Grace Carter’s in debt trying to keep her business and family afloat with maternity pay less than half the living wage

- TARA COBHAM

“Suddenly I felt like everything I’d ever worked for had crashed around me, suddenly I was losing everything,” says Grace Carter. “The idea of losing my business felt like losing a baby. I really, really struggled.”

After trying for years to have a second child, the 33-year-old was overjoyed when she gave birth to her daughter in November 2023.

However, she tells The Independent, she was left feeling suicidal as a result of the financial strain of having a baby and is still in a huge amount of debt after trying to keep her business as well as her young family afloat.

Ms Carter, from Colchester, has since joined calls for maternity pay to match the national living wage, and is demanding that the “economic contribution of mothers is appropriately recognised and compensated”.

She said she received Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP), which works out at the equivalent of a full-time worker on a 37.5 hour week earning around £4.99 per hour after the first six weeks of maternity leave. This is roughly just 41 per cent of the 2025 national living wage (NLW) of £12.21 per hour, which has been set out to ensure a basic standard of living.

Ms Carter – who is the founder of The Metamorphose Group, a collective of purpose-driven brands aimed at changing the lives of women and girls, which she has been building over eight years – said the combined effects of her being out of work, as the head of her company, and the discrimination she faced led to her business’ yearly turnover shrinking to almost half, from an average of £600,000 to £350,000 that year, and she was forced to borrow £140,000.