Four-day week: sagas of Icelanders

Posted on February 15, 2022 by wonkypolicywonk

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 Commissioner, concluding that a shorter working week (with no reduction in pay) could “contribute to the goal of a resilient Wales, and also a globally responsible Wales”. And, according to this breathless Autonomy report, no fewer than 57% of the Welsh public support a (hypothetical) Welsh Government-backed scheme to move towards a shorter working week (with no reduction in pay). Which rather begs the question: are the other 43% all masochistic idiots, or what?

Unfortunately, as the report itself quietly acknowledges, implementation of a four-day week for all Welsh workers falls “outside the current legislative capacities of the Welsh Government”. But no worries, because we already know from trials in Iceland, Germany and – *checks notes* – an unidentified charity that the four-day week (with no reduction in pay) is the best policy idea … EVER!

Indeed, according to a BBC news headline in July 2021, the introduction of a four-day week in Iceland has been an “overwhelming success”, with 86% of working Icelanders now entitled to “shorter hours for the same pay”. These lucky Icelanders report “feeling less stressed” and “having more time to spend with their families, do hobbies and complete household chores”, the BBC informs us. And sustainable democracy campaigner Gudmundur Haraldsson is on hand to tell the BBC:

“The Icelandic shorter working week journey tells us that not only is it possible to work less in modern times, but that progressive change is possible too.”

[And today, just hours after I published this post, the Guardian reports that “the four-day working week was trialled in Iceland between 2015 and 2019, and it has since become the choice of 85% of the country’s working population”. And the Telegraph similarly reports that “the four-day working week was tested in Iceland between 2015 and 2019, with 85% of its population continuing to do so”.]*

Yay! A four-day week, for five days’ pay! You can sign this enormously progressive wonk up for that. Well, maybe not the ‘completing household chores’ bit. But more time for my hobbies? Bring it ON.

However, if this all sounds just a wee bit too good to be true, that’s because it is too good to be true. For Iceland has not introduced a four-day week (with no reduction in pay).

Sure, between 2015 and 2019, Reykjavík city council and the Icelandic national government ran two trials of a shorter [sic] working week, with no reduction in pay. These involved a total of some 2,500 workers reducing their working week from 40 to 35 or 36 hours (so, not necessarily to a ‘four-day working week’). And official analysis of the trials concluded that “productivity and service provision remained the same or improved across the majority of trial workplaces”, while “worker well-being dramatically increased across a range of indicators, from perceived stress and burnout, to health and work-life balance”. 

However, these (arguably unsurprising) findings did not lead to the Icelandic government introducing a four-day week (with no reduction in pay) for Iceland’s workforce of some 200,000, which historically has tended to work relatively long hours, by international standards. Rather, in 2019 and 2020 contracts guaranteeing shorter working hours were agreed between trade unions and Iceland’s private sector employers, local councils and central government. And, according to the July 2021 report by think tank Autonomy on which the BBC news report was based, by June 2021 these new contracts covered some 170,000 trade union members (that is, 86% of the workforce).

More to the point, according to the Autonomy report, these new contracts delivered cuts to the previous working week of just 65 minutes in the public sector, and a mere 35 minutes in the private sector. Whoopee woo.

OK, maybe these small but welcome contractual adjustments will lead to greater change in the longer run. Seven months on from the July 2021 Autonomy report and BBC headline, it is still too early to know. All that this month’s Autonomy report on a more resilient Wales is able to tell us about what has transpired in Iceland is that the new collective agreements “leave open the possibility of reduced hours being implemented more widely across the [Icelandic] economy”. Ble mae’r parti?

Yes, the latest data from Eurostat (the statistical office of the EU Commission) indicates that the average weekly hours of full-time workers in Iceland fell from 44 hours in 2019, to … wait for it … 43.5 hours in 2020 (when there was a global Covid19 lockdown). But clearly we’ll need to see data for 2021 and 2022 before we start popping that siampên.

Whatever, the key point is that, while the Icelandic trials provide very helpful evidence of the (undeniable) benefits of a better work-life balance, and of the impact on productivity of a shorter working week, Iceland is not an example of the introduction of a four-day working week, as proposed for the UK by think tanks such as Autonomy and the Fabians.

None of which is to say that we should not be trying to work towards a shorter working week. As noted above, my hobbies (and even my family) stand waiting. But I’m also still waiting for advocates of the four-day week to explain exactly how it could be delivered across the UK economy without suppressing the income of the millions of hourly-paid workers on zero-hours contracts or other forms of precarious employment, most of whom simply cannot afford a 20% pay cut. On this, pretty much all that the latest Autonomy report has to say is that “there is potential to synergise the policy [of a four-day week] with [Universal] Basic Income”, because “the economic security provided by a guaranteed income can give precarious workers more power to decide their working routines”.

To which I say dim ond breuddwyd yw hynny i chi.

*Today’s report in the Guardian about a planned new law in Belgium – also in the Independent – failed to make the rather important distinction between a right to request compressed hours, and a four-day week as commonly understood (and as advocated by campaigners for, well, a four-day week). As the Telegraph managed to concede: “the Belgian model falls short of an actual shortened working week”. I am 86% sure this will lead to me writing another blog post pretty soon.

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Overdue: a Labour Party policy on equal parenting

Posted on January 20, 2022 by wonkypolicywonk

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 Gender Pay Gap, given how much of that pay gap is due to the ‘motherhood penalty’ – is that “a Labour Government would urgently review the failed Shared Parental Leave system, with reforms to incentivise sharing of leave”.

I suggested that, after a marathon, four-year evaluation of the SPL scheme by the current Government, pretty much the last thing we would want from a new Labour government would be yet another ‘review’ to tell us (again) what we already know. But what about those “reforms to incentivise sharing of leave”? And why on earth are they still talking about the sharing of parental leave?

The answer to these questions, I strongly suspect, is that the authors of the ‘green paper’ were heavily influenced by a proposal set out by the Fabian Society and Centre for Social Justice’s Early Years Commission in July 2021 (but seemingly available to and under discussion by at least some of the then shadow ministers for some time prior to publication of the Commission’s report).

Loosely based on the parental leave provisions in Sweden, this proposal would replace both the SPL scheme and the existing statutory maternity leave provisions with a new system consisting of 14 weeks of paid maternity leave (25 weeks fewer than now), 12 weeks of paid paternity leave (10 weeks more than now), and 60 weeks of shared parental leave, to be “shared as a couple wishes”. (In contrast, in Sweden each parent has their own entitlement to parental leave.)

Not to beat about the bush, the proposal is a horrible mess – if its author(s) first established and then followed any guiding principles, it is wholly unclear what those principles might be. And, accordingly, there are a number of reasons why Labour would be unwise to run with it.

Firstly, the proposal fails to recognise the very different purposes of maternity leave and parental leave. Pregnancy and childbirth are not equal endeavours on the part of two parents: unlike new fathers (and other second parents), new mothers need paid time off work to recover from the often severe physical and mental impacts. Plus, many of those new mothers will be breastfeeding (the World Health Organisation and UNICEF recommend that they do so, on demand, for six months).

Similarly, paternity leave is also a health and safety measure, aimed primarily at enabling the father (or other second parent) to support the mother at and immediately after the birth. Becoming a new mother is literally dangerous (especially for black women, who are four times more likely to die during pregnancy than white women). Becoming a new father, not so much.

Parental leave, however, is about parenting. And the goal of policy reform must be more equal parenting over the life of the child, not just in the first 12 or 18 months after birth. The reason those first 12 or 18 months matter so much is that there is overwhelming research evidence that fathers being involved in parenting early in the life of their child leads to greater, sustained involvement over the coming years. And, of course, sharing the care of the child in the first 12 to 18 months enables both parents to retain a strong link with the labour market. But that doesn’t imply or require identical entitlements to paid leave in those first 12 or 18 months.

We know – from BEIS research, a statement by BEIS minister Paul Scully to MPs in June 2020, and the DWP’s quarterly statistics on Maternity Allowance grants – that the average new mother in the UK takes some 39 weeks of statutory paid maternity leave. In other words, she takes her full entitlement to paid leave. And that is hardly surprising, as – contrary to the impression often given by Paul Scully and other government ministers, and even by some academic researchers – the amount of paid leave reserved for new mothers in the UK is short by international standards: in 2020, the OECD and EU averages were 51.5 weeks and 63.5 weeks respectively.

So, were a Labour government to implement the Fabians/CSJ proposal, and cut the duration of statutory paid maternity leave from 39 weeks to just 14 weeks, without reserving any of the 60 weeks of shared parental leave for mothers, it would move the UK to the far left of the following chart. And I’m not sure those are the optics that a new Labour government (or a Labour opposition seeking to win a General Election in 2023 or 2024) would be looking for.

Data source: Table PF2.1.A, Parental leave systems, OECD Family Database, October 2021.

Ironically, had the UK not left the European Union, it would also put the new Labour government at risk of infraction proceedings by the EU Commission. Because, as BEIS noted in its February 2013 impact assessment of the SPL scheme (see paragraph 33 on page 11), under Article 3 of the 1992 EU Pregnant Workers Directive the UK was (while in the EU) required to maintain its provisions at the time of transposition – which in 1999 was 28 weeks of paid maternity leave – not just the minimum of 14 weeks set out in Article 8 of the Directive (this is known as ‘non-regression’). Indeed, it is arguable that it would in any case put the new Labour government in breach of the non-regression provisions of the December 2020 Trade & Cooperation Agreement between the UK and the EU. And, as already noted, it would not sit well with the World Health Organisation and UNICEF recommendation that newborns be exclusively breastfed, on demand, for the first six months of their life.

Yes, under the Fabians/CSJ proposal, new mothers would also have access to some (or even all) of the proposed 60 weeks of shared parental leave. But that brings us to the second reason why Labour would be unwise to run with the proposal: it is simply not clear how or why the proposed entitlement to shared parental leave would work any better than Shared Parental Leave has since 2015.

Sure, a broadly similar system works in Sweden. But the UK is not Sweden, and it cannot be assumed that a system that works in Sweden would produce good results in the UK, where pregnancy and maternity discrimination and other poor practice by employers is widespread and deeply entrenched. Sweden is simply streets ahead of the UK in terms of the economic and social infrastructure, the societal norms, and the workplace culture that are conducive to more equal parenting. Most crucially, in Sweden parental pay is administered directly by the governmental Social Insurance Agency, rather than by employers, the cost of state-subsidised childcare is capped at a fraction of the average cost in the UK, and all children have a right to a place in a nursery school from the age of 12 months.

As the Fabians/CSJ Early Years Commission’s report itself notes, in the UK all too many new mothers “especially from low-income families, return to work earlier than they would have preferred”. So, quite why the members of the Commission thought the solution to that problem is to cut the duration of statutory paid leave reserved for new mothers by two-thirds, from 39 weeks to 14 weeks, is a bit of a mystery.

In short, implementation of the Fabians/CSJ model would drive a coach and horses through the key principle identified by the TUC and others: that the much-needed overhaul of the chronically failing SPL scheme must not involve any erosion of women’s existing rights to leave and pay. In doing so, it would send an appalling message to dinosaur employers all too happy to cut their contractual paid maternity leave to 14 weeks. And it would retain much of the legal and administrative complexity of the SPL scheme so abhorred by parents and employers.

Instead, the new crop of Labour shadow ministers (and their advisers) need to be thinking in terms of individual, non-transferable rights to paid leave for each parent. For it is clear from the international evidence that fathers are more likely to share child care if there is a specific portion of parental leave reserved for them. So, there should be no transferable or ‘shared’ leave, which in any case we know from bitter experience does not work well in the UK. And reform needs to significantly enhance provisions for new fathers (and other second parents), without eroding the existing rights of pregnant women and new mothers.

The Fabians and CSJ are right on one thing though: the need to increase the ludicrously low basic rate of statutory maternity, paternity and parental pay. From April this year the weekly rate of £156.66 will equate to just 47 per cent of a 35-hour week on the adult rate of the National Living Wage (NLW), down from 60% in 2012, and to just 37% of women’s median weekly earnings. Under the Fabians/CSJ proposal, the basic rate of maternity, paternity and parental pay would more than double, to parity with a 37.5-hour week on the NLW – a move that would add £3.4bn to the current annual spend of £2.6bn even without any new entitlements to leave.

Were the average new mother to take 38 of the 60 weeks of shared parental leave potentially available to her under the Fabians/CSJ proposal, in addition to her 14 weeks of maternity leave (i.e. a total of 52 weeks of paid leave, the OECD average entitlement), that would add another £1.8bn per year to the annual spend, even if the average father took no more leave than now. And, were the average new father to take just half of their extra ten weeks of paid paternity leave (as well as the two weeks he already has), and just five of the remaining 22 weeks of shared parental leave, that would add another £1.4bn per year. Yet those average fathers would still be taking only 19% of all leave taken (12 out of 64 weeks), well below the 28% in Sweden.

It remains to be seen whether shadow ministers (including the shadow Chancellor) are up for any – let alone all – of this potential extra cost of some £6.5bn per year, but the bottom line is that increasing the rate of statutory pay across the board is the only credible (and lawful) way to incentivise take-up of parental leave by fathers (as distinct from just making it easier for them to take leave). So, even if take-up of new leave entitlements were lower than assumed in the previous paragraph, the harsh truth is that any serious attempt to generate a shift towards more equal parenting will require serious money.

Which brings me to yet another problem with the Fabians/CSJ proposal. It is inconceivable that any government – even a new Labour government – would be in a position to implement reforms costing billions of pounds per year overnight, in one go. Realistically, such reforms will need to be spread over a decade, or even longer. Which means the reforms will need to be capable of being broken down into practicable stages, each building on the previous stage. And it’s not immediately obvious how the new legal framework at the heart of the Fabians/CSJ proposal could be broken down into a series of incremental, ‘stepping stone’ reforms.

Fortunately for shadow ministers, there is an ‘oven ready’ alternative to the Fabians/CSJ model. Maternity Action has proposed a simple 6+6+6 model consisting of individual, use-it-or-lose-it rights to six months of paid maternity leave (for birth mothers) and six months of paid parental leave for each parent. This would provide new fathers (and other second parents) with their own entitlement to six months of paid parental leave (to be taken in blocks or all in one go), while maintaining (in slightly altered form) the existing rights of pregnant women and new mothers.

This new legal framework (and a doubling of the basic rate of pay) could be introduced in stages over 10-15 years, with annual increases in the total spend of less than £300m in all but one year. And the principles on which the model is based have already been publicly endorsed by more than 20 organisations and trade unions, including the Fawcett Society, Gingerbread, NCT, the Royal College of Midwives, the TUC, Unison, Unite, the Women’s Budget Group and Working Families.

What’s not to like?

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Shared Parental Leave: Someday will surely come

Posted on January 13, 2022 by wonkypolicywonk

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 2017 and underway by late April 2018, the evaluation report has now been stuck in the bowels of BEIS for 45 months (some 1,350 days), despite the then business minister telling MPs in March 2019 that it would be published ‘later in 2019’, and the current business minister Paul Scully telling MPs in October 2020 that it would be published ‘later in 2020’.

And today, having told MPs in July last year that the evaluation report would be published ‘later in 2021’, Mr Scully revised that ETA to – you guessed it! – ‘later in 2022’.

It is hard for a lowly policy wonk to keep up with such fast-paced events, but – despite the evaluation evidently including “large scale, representative surveys of employers and parents, and a qualitative study of parents who have used the scheme” – the long-awaited evaluation report will most likely tell us little that we don’t already know.

We already know, for example, that those parents who do take Shared Parental Leave tend to regard the experience extremely positively, even if they gripe about the administrative complexity and ludicrously low rate of pay. And there is no shortage of anecdotal and survey evidence of the desire for more equal parenting on the part of both mothers and fathers. So, if the evaluation concludes that the SPL scheme has been a monumental failure, overall, it will struggle to blame this on a lack of demand from parents. As the Fawcett Society says, the demand is there.

And we do already know that the SPL scheme has been a monumental failure, overall, because we know that the number of eligible new fathers who have experienced the joys of taking Shared Parental Leave since 2015 is extremely small. According to raw data provided by HMRC in response to numerous Freedom of Information requests in recent years, just 12,600 people [sic] received statutory SPL pay in 2019/20, the fifth year of the SPL scheme. But HMRC has also confirmed both that this raw annual data is inflated by a degree of double counting, and that some 20% of the recipients are female (presumably either a lesbian partner of the birth mother, or the birth mother herself). And, if we adjust the raw data accordingly, to focus on the male recipients (i.e. on fathers), that extremely small number gets even smaller:

In September 2021, HMRC confirmed (in its response to FoI request FOI2021/20932) that, where a spell of SPL pay extends across the boundary between two financial years, the recipient is counted twice (once in each year); assuming the average duration of a spell of SPL pay to be 2 months, the raw data can be adjusted down by a factor of 5/6. And, on 1 February 2021, in its Answer to Parliamentary Question 146798, BEIS stated that HMRC’s raw data on SPL pay recipients “includes both mothers and fathers; however fathers, on average, make up over three-quarters of all recipients”.

Unfortunately, pending the evaluation report, there is a problem with using this (adjusted) HMRC data to estimate the rate of take-up of SPL among eligible fathers: we simply do not know how many eligible fathers there are each year. In 2013, in its impact assessment of the new policy (see Table 7 on p29), BEIS forecast the maximum number of eligible fathers to be 285,000 (a figure BEIS has never felt the need to revise). And using that figure as the denominator suggests a rate of take-up among the pool of eligible fathers of just 2.9% in 2019/20, well short of the Government’s stated target of 25%:

Assumes 285,000 eligible fathers each year. The drop in 2020/21 is almost certainly due to the impact of the Covid19 pandemic and associated economic lockdowns.

However, the actual number of eligible fathers is of course not fixed: it varies from year to year. And, more importantly, for all we know it may be quite different to 285,000. So, given that the 285,000 forecast was a maximum, it may be that the BEIS evaluation of the SPL scheme will come up with new, lower estimates of the actual number of eligible fathers in each year.

Conveniently for BEIS ministers, this would boost the rate of take-up among the pool of eligible fathers. But, as the following chart shows, in 2019/20 the number of eligible fathers would have to have been as low as 150,000 – barely more than half the maximum number forecast by BEIS in 2013 – for take-up among those eligible fathers to have been more than a still risible 5%.

A take-up rate among eligible fathers of even 5.6% is still well short of the Government’s stated target of 25%. So the evaluation report will most likely attempt to recycle the Coalition Government’s original, remarkably unambitious 2013 forecast – based on the findings of a telephone survey of parents conducted eight years previously, in 2005 – of 2-8% of eligible fathers. But the fact is that, four years later, in November 2017, the then business minister told the Women & Equalities Committee of MPs that the Government has a target of 25% of eligible fathers. And with good reason – a rate of take-up of just 2-8% among a (heavily) restricted pool of eligible fathers will not change the world.

Indeed, faced with that dismal official forecast, the response of the then ministers – yes, I’m looking at you, Nick Clegg and Jo Swinson – should have been to ask themselves quite why they were bothering to go to all the trouble of steering a major piece of legislation through Parliament (while disappointing their allies in the family rights sector and irritating the employer lobby).

Whatever, there is a downside for BEIS if its 45 months of analysis does conclude that the actual number of eligible fathers each year is as low as, say, 200,000. Because, from the outset, a major criticism of the SPL scheme and its complex eligibility rules has been that a substantial proportion of new fathers are not even eligible to take SPL. Every year, some 420,000 women start on statutory paid maternity leave (some 360,000 on SMP, and some 60,000 on Maternity Allowance – see below). And, broadly speaking (but see below), that means that, each year, there are some 420,000 new fathers who might want to access some of their partner’s statutory paid maternity leave under the SPL scheme. But 285,000 is just 68% of 420,000.

Indeed, according to ONS data, in 2018 there were 649,626 maternities in England & Wales (plus about another 60,000 in Scotland). Which means – again, broadly speaking – that, in total, there are more than 700,000 new fathers who might want to take some time off work to share the care of their newborn child in its first year of life. And 285,000 is just 41% of 700,000. But a new father can only access statutory Shared Parental Leave if his partner – that is, the child’s mother – qualifies for and starts on statutory paid maternity leave. Somehow, this made sense to Nick Clegg and Jo Swinson.

So, if the BEIS evaluation report ‘reveals’ the actual number of eligible fathers each year to be as low as 200,000, then it will also reveal the rather awkward fact that more than half of those 420,000 new fathers with a partner who qualifies for and starts on statutory paid maternity leave are not even eligible for SPL.

(OK, before you accuse me of being too heteronormative in my approach, the number of women in a lesbian couple who start on statutory paid maternity leave each year is small enough to disregard at this level of analysis. And the bottom line is that the SPL scheme needs to be judged by how many men – not how many lesbian women – take time off work under the scheme to share the care of the child that their partner has recently given birth to: lots of lesbian partners taking SPL to share the burden and joys of parenting won’t do very much to reduce the Gender Pay Gap.)

On the plus side, if you are a BEIS minister, this provides you with a potential solution to the problem of needing to be seen to ‘do something’ to address the monumental failure of the SPL scheme exposed by your evaluation report. With a lofty wave of your hand, you can say that your Government is going to ‘transform’ the scheme and level-up parenthood by – *checks notes* – tweaking the complex eligibility rules. And the necessary legislation will be introduced – *checks notes again* – just as soon as parliamentary time allows (or “in due course”). By which time (you hope), everyone will have moved on. Job done.

It goes without saying that, while extending eligibility to more new fathers is essential and would be very welcome, it wouldn’t ‘transform’ the SPL scheme, and it certainly wouldn’t level-up the challenging business of parenting a new child. If only 4% of 200,000 eligible fathers are using the SPL scheme now, then simply increasing the size of the pool of eligible fathers wouldn’t, by itself, increase that rate of take-up. And, as well as needing to widen eligibility among new fathers, we need take-up among eligible fathers to be much, much higher than 4% if we are to achieve a societal shift towards more equal parenting (the primary purpose of the SPL scheme). That is presumably why the Government has a target of 25%.

Indeed, rather than focus on take-up among the limited pool of eligible fathers, it is arguably more meaningful to use the same HMRC data on recipients of SPL pay, adjusted for double counting and gender, to generate figures for the proportion of new mothers who, having started on statutory paid maternity leave, use the SPL scheme to transfer some of that paid leave to the child’s father. For it is this proportion, rather than the rate of take-up among the (limited) pool of eligible fathers, that tells us most about the impact of the SPL scheme in driving a societal shift towards more equal parenting.

In 2019/20, for example, a total of some 418,000 new mothers started on statutory paid maternity leave (some 361,000 on SMP, and some 57,000 on Maternity Allowance, according to my reconciliation of the available – but conflicting – HMRC and DWP data). And, as the following chart shows, if 8,366 new fathers received SPL pay in 2019/20 (see the table above), that means 8,366 new mothers – just 2% of the 418,000 – transferred some of their paid maternity leave to the child’s father under the SPL scheme.

However, I am pretty confident we won’t see this chart (or anything like it) in the BEIS evaluation report. It seems far more likely that BEIS will simply ‘reveal’ the actual number of eligible fathers to be someway below the forecast maximum of 285,000, hail the thus inflated figures for take-up among this shrunken pool of eligible fathers as ‘broadly in line with our original forecast of 2-8%’, throw in some survey findings about how much dads love their time at home on SPL, and then do very little to reform the SPL scheme other than, perhaps, tweak the eligibility rules and have yet another promotional campaign. The Government may be led by a man with a passion for making babies, but there’s simply no evidence that he or anyone else in Whitehall has the balls to run with the kind of costly reform that would better enable parents who don’t live in an expensively refurbished Downing Street flat to share the labour and joys of caring for their new cherub.

So it is perhaps of more import how Angela Rayner, Justin Madders and others in the Labour Party respond to the evaluation report. In September last year, their otherwise hugely encouraging ‘green paper’ on employment rights was near silent on family-friendly rights, and on SPL all it said (see p10) was “a Labour Government would urgently review the failed Shared Parental Leave system, with reforms to incentivise sharing of leave”. And the last thing we need after a four-year, in-depth evaluation of the SPL scheme is yet another ‘review’ that would simply tell us (again) what we already know. But what about those ‘reforms to incentivise sharing of leave’?

That’s a question I’m going to leave for another post.

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The mother of all statistics

Posted on January 9, 2022 by wonkypolicywonk

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 government website. But you’d be wrong.

As I noted back in September, there is a figure – about 650,000 – that is widely used (or at least relied upon) by academic researchers, journalists, supposedly expert campaign groups such as Pregnant Then Screwed, employment lawyers and even the TUC. But that widely used figure is wrong.

We have known for some years that the figure must be wrong, because there are two sets of official data on recipients of Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP): one unpublished but provided by HMRC in response to numerous Freedom of Information requests in recent years, which is where the figure of ‘about 650,000’ comes from, and one published by the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP). And, as the following chart shows, the figures in those two data sets are not just different – they are very different:

This matters. Because, without knowing how many new mothers start on statutory paid maternity leave each year, we cannot, for example, estimate what proportion of such new mothers use the chronically failing Shared Parental Leave scheme to transfer some of their paid leave to the child’s father (a more meaningful measure of the success or otherwise of the SPL scheme than the rate of take-up among the limited pool of eligible fathers).

Furthermore, as I noted in my September blog post about take-up of statutory paid paternity leave, the DWP’s data set is published under the terms of a Memorandum of Understanding with the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), and reflects the Government’s financial delivery plans. So, if it’s wrong, the Chancellor’s annual Budget is also a pile of pants.

Accordingly, late last summer, I set out to get to the bottom of the glaring discrepancy between the two sets of data.

Soon after my September blog post, HMRC confirmed to me (in response to my Freedom of Information request FOI2021/20932), that the figures in their data set are inflated by double counting. In short, where a spell of SMP extends across the boundary between two financial years, the recipient is counted twice (once in each financial year). And, with the average new mother taking nine months of SMP (see below), there are a lot of spells of SMP that extend across the boundary between two financial years. So, there is a lot of double counting in the HMRC data set.

Then, in late October, the DWP confirmed to me (in response to my Freedom of Information request FOI2021/79684) that their data on SMP caseload understates the number of women who start on SMP each year, as the data is average caseload at any point in time, not total caseload over the year.

Fortunately, armed with this information, it is a relatively simple task to adjust the two data sets accordingly. Assuming the average duration of a spell on statutory maternity leave to be nine months (as is suggested by BEIS research, by a statement by BEIS minister Paul Scully to MPs in June 2020, and by the DWP’s quarterly statistics on Maternity Allowance grants), we can adjust the HMRC figures down by a factor of 4/7, and adjust the DWP figures up by a factor of 4/3, to generate a new chart:

We can then (a) average out the remaining small difference between the two sets of data, and (b) add the some 60,000 Maternity Allowance starts each year (from the DWP’s quarterly statistics), to give us figures for the number of women who start on statutory paid maternity leave each year:

You’re welcome.

(Incidentally, I did ask policy officials in the BEIS family rights team – the team that works on e.g. maternity leave and SPL policy – to assist with my reconciliation of the HMRC and DWP data sets, and later to comment on my adjusted figures, but they repeatedly declined to do so. Make of that what you will.)

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Single Enforcement Body: Are we nearly there yet?

Posted on December 22, 2021 by wonkypolicywonk

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 more than 20 years since yours truly, then a lowly employment policy wonk at Citizens Advice, first proposed a consolidation of the three main enforcement bodies – the HMRC minimum wage enforcement team, the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate, and the then Gangmasters Licensing Authority (now the Gangmasters & Labour Abuse Authority) – into “a single Fair Employment Agency fit for the 21st century, with the legal powers and resources to ‘root out the rogues’ without imposing unnecessary regulatory burden on the great majority of compliant employers”.

Back in October 2019, we were just weeks away from a General Election campaign in which the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats would all pledge to establish such a single enforcement body, should they form the next government. You wait 18 years for a manifesto pledge to implement your great policy idea, and then three come along at once. But on 14 December 2019, it was Boris Johnson who triumphantly returned to Downing Street with a manifesto commitment to “get a single enforcement body done”. Or something.

They say every cloud has a silver lining and, as far as this policy wonk is concerned, they are right. Because, later that month, a Brexit-focused Queen’s Speech promised an Employment Bill that will “strengthen workers’ ability to get redress for poor treatment by creating a new, single enforcement body”, as well as “offer greater protections for workers by prioritising fairness in the workplace, and introducing better support for working families”. That is definitely my kind of silver lining.

Needless to say, the promised Bill did not materialise in 2020, and was then surprisingly omitted from the Government’s second Queen’s Speech, in May 2021.

Worse still, in January 2021 a somewhat disgruntled Matthew Taylor – Interim Director of Labour Market Enforcement and a committed and persuasive advocate of a Single Enforcement Body since his July 2017 Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices – had come to the end of his contract, and had exited muttering under his breath that the Johnson-led Government has not “fully grasped the scale of the opportunity provided by the [single enforcement body]” (an opinion reported as early as February 2021, and confirmed earlier this month by the much delayed publication of Taylor’s Labour Market Enforcement Strategy 2021 to 2022).

Matthew Taylor, in the Foreword to his Labour Market Enforcement Strategy 2021 to 2022, submitted to Government on 30 January 2021 and published on 13 December 2021

However … in June 2021 the Government published its response to the high level consultation it had conducted between July and October 2019, and this confirmed the Government’s commitment “to create [a single enforcement body], as set out in the Government’s manifesto. The new body will not just bring together three existing bodies into a single, recognisable organisation, it will deliver a significantly expanded remit. As a result, more vulnerable workers across the country will receive money that is owed to them.” And the response suggested, in words I could have written myself anytime between 2001 and 2013, that as well as the benefit to workers:

Employers – large and small – will benefit from the creation of a more level playing field, with less risk of being unfairly undercut by an unscrupulous or criminally exploitative competitor, and from the availability of more practical, and better co-ordinated, business support services.

Actually, no, those are words I did write myself, in a 2004 Citizens Advice pamphlet setting out the case for a single enforcement body. What the Government’s June 2021 response said is:

This body will not just protect workers, it will also help to provide a level playing field for the majority of employers who respect the law, and who also lose out when unscrupulous businesses cut corners and exploit workers. In these challenging economic times, it is more important than ever that we take action against such behaviour and support responsible businesses to flourish and level-up all areas of the country. The body will also provide more support for businesses to understand their obligations and get things right, in part by bringing three separate organisations together into a single body.

It’s fair to say that, since then, not a lot seems to have happened (other than that, in September, the Labour Party reiterated that it would also “establish and properly fund a single enforcement body to enforce workers’ rights”). And, for sure, there is still no sign of the promised Employment Bill. Hopefully, the Government is quietly getting on with “developing more detailed plans for the body in partnership with the existing enforcement bodies” – one of the key ‘next steps’ set out in June. Whatever, just yesterday, a BEIS spokesperson reiterated that:

Protecting and enhancing workers’ rights is an absolute priority for the Government, which is why we have committed to establishing a single enforcement body to protect vulnerable workers across the UK.

I guess the Government has absolute priorities, and absolute priorities. However, despite its omission from the Queen’s Speech in May, there is nothing to stop ministers bringing forward the Employment Bill in the current parliamentary session (i.e. before the Government’s third Queen’s Speech, expected in May 2022), and with a General Election in May 2023 looking increasingly likely they do need to get a wiggle on if they are to progress what is set to be a mahoosive and complex Bill onto the Statute Book by then.

So, sorry kids, we are not nearly there yet. But we are over half way!

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Reform of Shared Parental Leave: pass the Senokot

Posted on November 16, 2021 by wonkypolicywonk

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 problem: their marathon evaluation of the chronically failing Shared Parental Leave scheme is stuck fast in the bowels of the Department.

First announced in March 2017 and underway by April 2018, the BEIS evaluation has now been in progress for 43 months, or some 1,300 days. I’ve seen dead snails move more quickly.

Way back in November 2017, the then business minister told MPs on the Women & Equalities Committee that the evaluation would be carried out “next year” – the clear implication being that it would be complete by the end of 2018. And the minister indicated it was already clear that the policy was failing. Asked about take-up by eligible fathers, she candidly stated:

“Take‑up is disappointing. It is under 10%. I would regard 25% as successful. I would regard anything over 20% as very encouraging. We are not going to see those figures, so [our evaluation] is going to demonstrate that we have a lot more to do.”

Four years on, my latest analysis of the relevant HMRC and DWP data indicates that just 1.5% of the 2.6 million new mothers who started on statutory paid maternity leave since April 2015 used the Shared Parental Leave scheme to transfer some of that paid leave to the child’s father. In 2019/20, the fifth year of the scheme, just 8,370 (2%) of the 418,000 such mothers did so. That is simply not enough to help bring about the societal shift to more equal parenting that we need to see if we are ever to eradicate the gender pay gap.

No wonder no one at BEIS is reaching for the Senokot. Because, should they ever release their evaluation report, they will have to tell us what – if anything – they plan to do to remedy this colossal policy failure. And such policy remedies don’t come cheap.

Update 21 June 2022: HMRC has now provided (in response to a FoI request) the relevant raw data for 2021/22, and this indicates that, while use of the SPL scheme by new mothers on statutory paid maternity leave has bounced back from a Covid-induced dip in 2020/21, it is now flatlining at a less than impressive 2%:

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Employment Tribunal stats: When will I see you again?

Posted on November 3, 2021 by wonkypolicywonk

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 – HM Courts & Tribunals Service has finally (and quietly) published some data on Employment Tribunal receipts.

On 18 October, justice minister James Cartlidge told shadow justice minister Alex Cunningham and other MPs that:

The most recent employment tribunal data covers the period up to March 2021. This is because [the employment tribunal system] has moved to a new case management system, and HMCTS is currently working to incorporate the new IT system alongside longer-established data sources to provide a more complete and consistent data set for this jurisdiction.

However, late last week we learnt (from the minutes of the most recent ET National User Group meeting) that, just four days previously, on 14 October, HMCTS had quietly published a new set of management information on “workload and timeliness for HMCTS criminal, civil and family courts, and tribunals”. And this set of management information includes data on Employment Tribunal receipts (but not disposals) up to August 2021. Maybe someone should have told minister Cartlidge.

Whatever, is this a precious moment? Or do we employment policy nerds have to suffer and cry the whole night through a bit longer?

Well, the following chart adds the new data (for the months March to August 2021) to the previously published figures for the period January 2017 to February 2021. And maybe the number of new ET cases really did plummet by 42% between November 2020 and May 2021, to a level not seen since before the abolition of ET fees in July 2017.

Or maybe some new cases got ‘lost’ while the new Case Management System was being taught how to count the number of cases that it is managing. You decide.

[Update, 14 April 2022: In its latest monthly data release, setting out data up to February 2022, HMCTS has omitted the questionable figures for ET receipts in the period March to August 2021.]

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The incredible shrinking SPL take-up figures

Posted on September 27, 2021 by wonkypolicywonk

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 more than a pile of pants. And today, in response to my Freedom of Information request, HM Revenue & Customs have confirmed that EMW’s narrative is indeed, as the never knowingly understated Independent might report it, “broken”.

In short, EMW have for years based their narrative on HMRC figures for (a) the number of claimants (new fathers, mostly) paid statutory paternity pay, and (b) the number of claimants (new mothers) paid statutory maternity pay. Using the latter as a proxy for the number of fathers who are eligible for statutory paid paternity leave is highly questionable, but in any case it turns out those HMRC figures are inflated by a lot of double-counting. As HMRC confirm:

The number of claimants is the total number of individuals in receipt during that year, irrespective of when the payment first started. Where a given spell of [statutory maternity pay, statutory paternity pay or statutory shared parental pay] extends across two years, the claimant will be included in both years’ figures.

In the case of statutory maternity pay, this inflationary effect is substantial: up to 75%, if we assume (as seems to be the case – see image below) that, on average, women take nine months of SMP (i.e. their full entitlement). But with statutory paternity pay, the inflationary effect is negligible (because claimants can only take one or two weeks of paternity leave).

BEIS minister Paul Scully, giving oral evidence to the Petitions Committee of MPs on 11 June 2020

Maybe this doesn’t matter very much – the few press reports that EMW secured last month with their annual press release about the same set of HMRC data haven’t sparked a national debate about reform of paternity leave. Interestingly, however, EMW are also responsible for another take-up figure that frequently does feature in policy debate.

Only today, I received a document that states “the current UK [shared] parental leave scheme has a very poor uptake, with only around 1% of fathers using the scheme”. And, like many before them, the author of this document was almost certainly thinking of this news release from the TUC in April 2019:

The TUC is today calling for an overhaul of shared parental leave.

Last year only 9,200 new parents took shared parental leave – just 1% of those eligible to do so.

The TUC believes take-up is low because the scheme is so low-paid (£145.18 per week) making it unaffordable for most fathers.

A ‘note to Editors’ at the bottom of the news release states: “the University of Birmingham found that only 9,200 new parents (just over 1% of those entitled to take it) took SPL in 2017/2018”. However, the University of Birmingham’s short September 2018 report makes clear (see Reference 3) that it simply lifted the 1% figure from a (since deleted or moved) press release from … the law firm EMW.

Furthermore, it’s clear (including from a later EMW press release that has not been deleted) that EMW got to that 1% figure (1.4%, to be precise) by dividing HMRC’s figure for the number of claimants paid statutory shared parental pay in 2017/18 (9,200) by HMRC’s figure for the number of women paid statutory maternity pay that year (662,000) – that is, in the same way they calculated the take-up rate for paternity leave.

However, we now know that figure for the number of women paid SMP is inflated (by up to 75%) by HMRC’s double-counting. And in any case EMW are wrong to assume that the number of women who went onto statutory maternity pay is the same as the number of fathers who are eligible to take shared parental leave. In 2013, in its impact assessment of the new policy (see Table 7 on p29), the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy assumed the maximum number of eligible fathers to be just 285,000 (a figure BEIS has never felt the need to revise).

Whatever, now that HMRC have confirmed how their raw annual figures are inflated by double-counting, and using that BEIS figure of 285,000 eligible fathers, we can adjust those HMRC figures, to remove the likely double-counting in respect of shared parental pay, and so arrive at new estimates for the rate of take-up of shared parental leave among eligible fathers since 2015/16. (Note that we also need to adjust the HMRC figures to allow for the fact that, as confirmed in Footnote 5 of this Answer to a Parliamentary Question by Ed Miliband in February 2021, at least 20% of HMRC’s claimants for statutory shared parental pay are mothers who have converted their maternity leave to shared parental leave, as they must do before the father can access statutory shared parental leave and pay.)

I have previously suggested that SPL take-up among eligible fathers was as ‘high’ as 3.6% in 2019/20. But I didn’t know then that HMRC’s annual figures for the number of shared parental pay claimants include the double-counting that HMRC have now confirmed. I should have known better, frankly, but for what it’s worth here are my new estimates of SPL take-up:

[NB: If you are a nerd and would like to see how I arrived at these figures, just ask and I’ll send you a spreadsheet]

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Is the paternity leave system “broken”?

Posted on September 20, 2021 by wonkypolicywonk

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 in the Independent newspaper – headline: “Parental leave system is broken: number of fathers taking paternity leave plunges to 10-year low” – and the supposedly specialist journals Personnel Today and People Management, it’s about 650,000:

Only 27% of eligible fathers took time off last year; 176,000 men took paternity leave and claimed statutory paternity pay in the 12 months to 31 March 2021 compared with 652,000 women who took maternity leave over the same period.

The data was released by HM Revenue & Customs following a Freedom of Information request by law firm EMW.

All three news reports were based on a press release by law firm EMW. Indeed, in recent years, EMW have been admirably effective at getting press coverage out of pretty much the same story, based on the same (updated) set of HMRC data: here they are in the Independent and Management Today in July 2019, and the Telegraph and HR News in August 2020. One year it’s ‘Only one third of fathers are taking paternity leave!’, and the next it’s ‘Two thirds of fathers are not taking paternity leave!’ Well done, law firm EMW.

We can only guess how EMW would have framed this unchanging story last month, had the Covid19 pandemic not come along in 2020. This provided them with the somewhat over-dramatic “paternity leave take-up has hit a 10-year low, with only approximately a quarter of eligible fathers (27%) taking paternity leave after the birth of their child” hook, to the excitement of sub-editors at the Independent and the usual suspects such as Pregnant Then Screwed. But then it is hardly surprising, given how much of the workforce was on furlough for much of 2020/21, that some 30,000 new fathers decided to continue at home on furlough, on 80-100% of their normal wages, rather than take one or two weeks of statutory paternity leave on just £150 per week.

Whatever, here’s that HMRC data in full, showing that – *checks notes* – the paternity leave system is broken:

However, there are several problems with this narrative, and the HMRC data on which it is based.

The first problem is the assumption by EMW that the number of fathers (and other second parents) who are eligible to claim statutory paternity pay (i.e. the denominator for their paternity leave take-up rate) is the same as the number of women who started statutory paid maternity leave. There are a number of reasons why this is not the case, but to be fair it’s probably the best proxy available, so we can probably let this one pass.

The second problem is that, if we do assume that the number of fathers (and other second parents) who are eligible to claim statutory paternity pay is the same as the number of women who started statutory paid maternity leave, then we probably need to include in that latter number at least some of the 60,000 women who go on Maternity Allowance, rather than SMP, each year. The legal eagles at EMW seem to have forgotten about Maternity Allowance, but adding the 40,000 employed new mothers who get Maternity Allowance to their base figure of (about) 650,000 would make the paternity leave system look even more “broken”: it would, for example, indicate a paternity leave take-up rate of just 30% in 2019/20, not 32% as suggested by EMW.

However, the third – and biggest – problem with EMW’s narrative is that the number of women who start statutory maternity pay each year is not (about) 650,000, or anywhere near that number.

For a start, according to ONS data, in 2018 there were only 649,626 maternities in England and Wales, plus about 60,000 in Scotland. And a significant proportion of those 710,000 mothers (plus those in Northern Ireland) will not have been in employment (in March 2019, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy estimated the employment rate of ‘women of child bearing age’ to be 73%). So it’s just not credible that pretty much all of the 710,000 went onto either SMP or Maternity Allowance.

More to the point, every year the DWP publishes data for benefits expenditure and caseload, including for SMP and Maternity Allowance. This data is published under the terms of a Memorandum of Understanding with the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), and reflects the Government’s financial delivery plans. So, if it’s wrong, the Budget is a pile of pants. And, according to this data, between 2012/13 and 2020/21, the average number of women going on to SMP was just 268,000 (within a range of 262,000 to 275,000).

The DWP also publishes quarterly data for Maternity Allowance starts, including a breakdown by employment status (’employed’ or ‘self-employed’), so we can add the some 40,000 employed women who started on Maternity Allowance each year to the OBR-approved number of women who started on SMP. (Note that, in 2020/21, there was also a pandemic-related dip in the number of employed women who started on Maternity Allowance, from 40,000 to 30,000. Believe it or not, neither law firm EMW nor Pregnant Then Screwed have yet made a fuss about this.)

This combined data gives us a significantly different denominator (for calculating the take-up rate of paternity leave) to the HMRC data relied upon by law firm EMW and their friendly (but somewhat uninformed) journalists, and so a rather different picture of the take-up of statutory paternity leave:

Now you might still argue that even this data shows the paternity leave system to be ‘broken’. But I would suggest that a take-up rate of about 70% is not that bad, really, given the stupidly low rate at which such leave is paid and the other barriers to take-up, not to mention the fact that a good chunk of the ‘missing’ 30% will be new fathers who are self-employed, so are not even entitled to statutory paid paternity leave. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why, as mentioned above, law firm EMW are wrong to assume that the number of new fathers who are eligible to take statutory paternity leave is the same as the number of new mothers who start statutory paid maternity leave.

So, which set of data on SMP is correct, and why the discrepancy between the two? Well, at the time of writing, there’s no definitive answer to that, but this recent Answer by Treasury minister Jesse Norman to a Parliamentary Question by Kirsten Oswald MP strongly suggests (a) that the Government favours the OBR-certified data in the DWP’s annual Benefit Expenditure & Caseload tables; and (b) that one reason for the discrepancy is that the HMRC data on SMP provided to law firm EMW (and others) via Freedom of Information requests includes a lot of double counting, because it “includes claimants in each year in which they received statutory payments”.

In other words, a woman who took nine months of statutory maternity leave on SMP from October 2019 to June 2020, say, will have been counted twice by HMRC, first in its figure for 2019/20, and then in its figure for 2020/21. With women taking nine months of statutory paid maternity leave, on average, this means the HMRC data overstates the true figure by up to 75%. (There may well be such double counting in HMRC’s figures for statutory paternity pay, too, but as claimants take only one or two weeks of such pay, the inflationary effect will be negligible.)

Allowing for this double counting would reduce the HMRC figure of some 650,000 SMP starts a year to as little as 370,000 (which would increase EMW’s paternity leave take-up rate for 2019/20, from 32% to 56%). But that still leaves a significant discrepancy between the HMRC data and that published by the DWP as part of the OBR-certified Benefit Expenditure & Caseload tables.

I’m awaiting a response from HMRC to a Freedom of Information request seeking an explanation of the discrepancy, so maybe everything will yet become clear. Or, more likely, it won’t. But watch this space.

(For the record, none of the above is to dispute that our parental leave system is broken. It is very broken, and I have written extensively about just how broken it is. But paternity leave is the least important part of that system and, while it should be better paid and be a Day One right for all workers, including the self-employed, there are much bigger fish to fry in this policy area.)

Update (27 September): In its response to my FoI request, HMRC has confirmed that the figures provided to the law firm EMW (and others) include lot of double-counting:

The number of claimants is the total number of individuals in receipt during that year, irrespective of when the payment first started. Where a given spell of [statutory shared parental leave pay, statutory maternity pay or statutory paternity pay] extends across two years, the claimant will be included in both years’ figures.

So, EMW’s narrative about the take-up rate of statutory paternity leave is indeed ‘broken’.

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Employment Tribunal claims: Will the Lewis-Thomson Theorem pass the test of time?

Posted on June 10, 2021 by wonkypolicywonk

With the release this morning of the latest set of quarterly Employment Tribunal (ET) statistics, covering Q4 of 2020/21 (Jan – Mar 2021), and with last week having seen the latest farcical performance of the ‘spot a quirk in the ET stats and get our name in the papers’ PR party trick – this time by Stuart Lewis of Rest Less and Patrick Thomson of the Centre for Ageing Better – I thought it might be interesting to check on how the oh-so-confident predictions of previous performers of the trick have actually turned out.

The first of our past performers is DLA Piper’s legal eagle – but statistical sparrow – Jane Hannon, who in May 2020 secured a nice little piece in the Guardian, under the headline “29,000 claims a year despite 50 years since Equal Pay Act”. This ‘revealed’ that “a consistently high number of workers are alleging that their employers are illegally paying them less than colleagues in similar roles”, and that “the number of claims brought to employment tribunals [is] showing no sign of decreasing”.

Unfortunately for Ms Hannon – who really should have gone to Specsavers – a slightly more than cursory analysis of the ET statistics showed the somewhat inconsistent number of claims decreasing in no fewer than ten of the previous 12 years, including in each of the two most recent years, 2018/19 and 2019/20.

And today, the latest set of statistics confirms that this downwards trend continued in 2020/21, with the number of equal pay claims decreasing by another 65%, to its lowest level in at least the last 16 years. But hey, who could possibly have seen the signs?

Next up in our rogues’ gallery of past performers is Hannah Mahon, a partner at GQ Littler, which modestly describes itself as “the world’s leading employment law firm”. In July 2019, Ms Mahon secured near-identical articles in the Financial Times, the Daily Fail, the Metro and the Times about a 69% “spike” in the number of sex discrimination claims in 2018/19. Ms Mahon attributed this to “a big increase in the public airing of sexual harassment claims” in the era of #MeToo: “It’s a much more public thing now. People are starting to understand their rights and feeling less shy about speaking out.”

Unfortunately for Ms Mahon, a slightly more than cursory analysis of the ET statistics showed that pretty much all of the 69% spike had occurred in Scotland, and only in the two months June and August 2018. In England & Wales, the number of sex discrimination claims had actually fallen, by 8%. Ms Mahon would probably get on well with Stuart Lewis of Rest Less and Patrick Thomson of the Centre for Ageing Better, who failed to spot (or deliberately overlooked) the rather obvious fact that most of their 176% explosion in age discrimination claims in Q3 of 2020/21 occurred only in Scotland, only in October 2020, and had nothing whatsoever to do with firms ditching older staff during the pandemic.

And today, the latest set of statistics suggests that the #MeToo movement has yet to impact on women’s understanding of their rights, or their shyness about speaking out about sexual harassment at work, as the number of sex discrimination claims has fallen by 45% since 2018/19, and is now at a diminutive level rarely seen over the last 14 years.

Next up is Sophie Vanhegan, another partner at GQ Littler, who in June 2019 secured a lengthy piece in People Management – the official journal of the CIPD – about a 56% increase in pregnancy/maternity discrimination claims in 2017/18. Vanhegan attributed this ‘spike’ to the #MeToo movement making women more aware of unacceptable behaviour, especially related to pregnancy: “Things that may have simply just been accepted in the past are now being seen as unacceptable and people are feeling more confident in being able to challenge them” by bringing an ET claim.

Vanhegan was supported by Claire McCartney, a senior policy adviser at the CIPD, who said that “while the removal of tribunal fees may have accounted for some of the increase, there has also been a greater awareness of maternity and paternity rights, and an increased willingness to make claims”. And campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed were quick to jump on the bandwagon, tweeting that “the number of women experiencing discrimination has definitely risen but this [56% increase] is more about women feeling empowered to do something about it – all our hard work feels like it’s paying off.”

Leaving aside the rather obvious point that the #MeToo movement didn’t even start, on the other side of the Atlantic, until half-way through 2017/18, a slightly more than cursory analysis of the ET statistics showed that the 56% increase in pregnancy/maternity discrimination claims was entirely in line with the 60% increase in the number of new ET cases due to the abolition of ET fees in July 2017, just three months into 2017/18.

And today, the latest set of statistics confirms that, if the #MeToo movement has had any lasting impact on the willingness of pregnant women and new mothers in the UK to bring a pregnancy/maternity discrimination claim, it has been in the wrong direction. For, having bounced back to just short of its pre-ET fees level in 2018/19, the number of pregnancy/maternity discrimination claims has since fallen by 21%. Clearly, Pregnant Then Screwed need to be working a little harder.

Who knows, maybe last week’s performance of the PR party trick by Rest Less and the Centre for Ageing Better will prove to be the exception to the rule, and they will secure a footnote in employment policy history as the discoverers of a sustained, upwards trend in the number of age discrimination claims linked to Covid19 and the associated lockdowns. Maybe employment lawyers and policy wonks will sit around talking reverentially about the Lewis-Thomson Theorem, and nodding sagely.

Time will tell. But today’s set of employment statistics doesn’t bode well for the Lewis-Thomson Theorem. After removing another obvious multiple claimant case (in Scotland, in February 2021, with some 1,400 claimants), we find that age discrimination claims have fallen by 27% over the two most recent quarters. Have employers stopped ditching older staff because of the pandemic already? I have no idea. Ask Stuart Lewis at Rest Less.

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