Author Archives: wonkypolicywonk

Last week, the Good Law Project, run by my good friend Jolyon Maugham QC, was in the news for claiming to have won a legal case challenging alleged cronyism on the part of government ministers when appointing Dido Harding and … Continue reading →

There being an R in the month, there is a new report making the case for a four-day week. This month, the focus is on Wales, with a report by think tank Autonomy, commissioned by the Future Generations for Wales … Continue reading →

Recently on this blog, I noted that pretty much all that Labour’s otherwise impressively ambitious September 2021 ‘green paper’ on employment rights had to say about securing a much-needed societal shift towards more equal parenting – a shift essential to ending the … Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, yet another year came to an end without the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) having concluded its marathon evaluation of the chronically failing Shared Parental Leave scheme. Originally due to start in March … Continue reading →

Four months ago on this blog, I posed the question: How many women start on statutory paid maternity leave in the UK each year? You’d think this would be a well-known and widely used official statistic, freely available on some … Continue reading →

Just over two years ago, in October 2019, I wrote on this blog about the long and difficult gestation of the Government’s proposed Single Enforcement Body for employment rights, to “tackle the deeply fragmented enforcement landscape”. And it is now … Continue reading →

While a rampant stomach bug is reported to have caused most competitors in last month’s six-day, 250km Marathon Des Sables in the Sahara a nasty bout of the runs, officials at Kwasi Kwarteng’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) face the opposite … Continue reading →

So, after a gap of eight months – due to the going live, in March, of a shiny new (and no doubt expensive) Case Management System that it seems cannot reliably count the number of cases it is managing – … Continue reading →

Earlier this month, I wrote here about the law firm EMW and their narrative – eagerly sucked up by a few so-called journalists – about the supposedly low take-up of statutory paternity leave. I suggested that EMW’s narrative is little … Continue reading →

How many women go on statutory maternity pay in the UK each year? Go on, have a guess. Or maybe you know the number? Perhaps you do. Or maybe you only think you do. According to news reports last month … Continue reading →