Government launch parental leave review

ODN

The government has launched a review into parental leave as the current system has been criticised. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said the Government will look at the whole system, including maternity leave and paternity leave, to see how it can be improved.   Report by Kennedyl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

Transcript

00:00I want to give all families a better start in life.

00:03And so what we have at the minute, I think it's confusing.

00:06Eight different parental leave entitlements for business in particular.

00:09They say to me they don't know exactly what they should or shouldn't be doing and offering on that.

00:14We're not particularly supportive compared to other countries.

00:17And yet, you know, one in three new dads takes no paternity leave at all.

00:21Shared parental leave was introduced. Hardly anyone is taking that.

00:23So I want to look for the first time in decades at the overall system of parental leave.

00:28Holistically, I want to work with business in terms of how we might reform that going forward.

00:32But I also want to let's acknowledge that, you know, self-employment is a much bigger part of the labour market these days.

00:37How could it work for self-employed people? Families are different.

00:40Kinship care is a much bigger part of life today. How could we reflect that?

00:43So it's a really big, serious piece of work, which I hope will give us a set of proposals.

00:48We can get a big coalition around and fundamentally allow people to spend a bit more time with new children at a really key part of their lives.

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