Maternity benefits extended
Employees who become pregnant will now benefit from more generous maternity rights. The new rules apply to women with babies due on or after 1 April 2007, although they also impose various additional responsibilities on such women towards their employers.
Every woman is now entitled to take up to one year’s maternity leave regardless of her length of service with her employer. This is split into 26 weeks of ordinary and 26 weeks of additional maternity leave. During ordinary maternity leave, a woman must normally receive all contractual benefits apart from salary. During additional maternity leave, which follows without a gap, only certain terms of the employment contract must apply, although employers and employees may agree that other terms will continue.
Maternity pay is a separate entitlement and women must meet qualifying conditions based on their length of service and pay to qualify for it. These conditions have not changed, although a woman is now entitled to 39 weeks of statutory maternity pay (SMP) instead of 26. As before, the first six weeks are paid at 90% of the woman’s average earnings and the remaining period at the statutory rate of £112.75 a week.
The chances are that maternity pay will be extended to 52 weeks from April 2009, although the government has not yet confirmed the start date. Small employers – those who paid £45,000 or less in national insurance in the previous year – can claim back 104.5% of SMP, and larger employers can claim back 92%.
A new and welcome feature is that a woman on maternity leave can do up to ten days’ mutually agreed paid work, called ‘keeping in touch’ without losing her SMP. The expectation is that these days will be used to attend training events or team meetings to keep informed about work developments, but a woman can also carry out any other agreed employment duties. The law now also makes it clear that the employer can make ‘reasonable contact’ with an employee during maternity leave.
Another change is that employees must now provide at least eight weeks’ notice, instead of four weeks, if they want to return early from maternity leave. All these rules also apply to employees taking statutory adoption leave, where the child is due to be adopted after 31 March 2007.
Legislation introduced last year also makes provision for fathers to take up to 26 weeks of additional paternity leave before the child’s first birthday. A father would only be able to take additional leave if the mother has returned to work. No start date has been set for this change but it is likely to be April 2009.
Employers sometimes consider the maternity rights legislation to be onerous and in the past some have tried to avoid employing or promoting women of child-bearing age. Such discrimination is illegal under both sex and age discrimination legislation and could result in the employer being taken to an employment tribunal and being ordered to pay compensation.
It is not difficult to insure against the costs of maternity and adoption leave, primarily the cost of employing temporary staff to cover absence. In addition, we can help you plan ahead so that your business suffers the minimum disruption if a key employee takes maternity leave or is absent for any other reason.