Experts criticise 'lost decade of progress' on rights for parents

Experts have criticised a “lost decade” of progress on parental rights after Guardian research suggested that fewer than one in 60 public sector workers are sharing leave with their partners when they have a baby.

- Alexandra Topping Richard Preston

Ten years after the introduction of shared parental leave in the UK, the policy's architects said it had failed to deliver on its promise of “culture change” and called for measures to allow more men to spend time with their babies.

New data obtained by the Guardian reveals that in the past five years just one in every 64 requests for parental leave in four of the UK's biggest public sector employers were for shared parental leave, which gives parents the right to split up to 52 weeks of leave, including up to 39 weeks of statutory shared parental pay.

Freedom of information requests made by the Guardian show only 1.55% of parental leave requests made at those employers in the last five years were for shared parental leave (SPL). From 274,755 requests for parental leave across NHS England, Scotland and Wales, HMRC, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Work and Pensions between 2020 and 2025, only 4,264 were for SPL.

Jo Swinson, the former Liberal Democrats leader who introduced the 2015 policy in the Commons when she was the minister for employment relations, said low take-up of SPL in public bodies was “disappointing” and blamed successive Tory governments. “It’s definitely a policy that hasn’t achieved its potential, partly because it hasn’t had the backing, energy, encouragement of a government that believed in it,” she said.

Campaigners and policy shapers have long argued that the SPL policy is a failure, with a key study from the University of Bath last year finding it had “fallen Jo Swinson was eight months pregnant when she announced plans for shared parental leave to revolutionise the lives of parents. The moment her “baby in government” came into force in 2015 was emotional, she told the Guardian.