Today in Parliament we debated a petition to “Raise statutory maternity/paternity pay to match the National Living Wage” – this was completed by 107,967 people. There was a lot of demand to take part in the debate from MPs, so in the end speeches had to be limited to just 90 seconds… brutal, given that my speech was timed at 6 minutes. The text below is the speech that I would have gave!

Speech – Reforming Maternity/Paternity Pay
Being a parent is the hardest job in the world, and the state has a duty to make it easier.

The first years of a child’s life are profoundly important. This is a time when parents should be able to commit all of their focus and attention towards bonding with their child. But unfortunately, for many, they must balance this new and, frankly, often quite challenging responsibility against the financial toll that an extended period of time away from work will entail.

Countless UK families now end up in serious financial hardship when they are forced to rely on statutory maternity or paternity pay, alone. A recent study indicated that this issue is particularly prevalent in the private sector – across 2024 to 2025, 2.5 million women with a private sector employer, reported only receiving statutory maternity pay.

As others have noted, this can mean effectively living on £187 a week, while recovering from a pregnancy and/or supporting a very young child. It’s clear that we need to rethink this if we want families to thrive in Britain.

We are, rightly, concerned with falling birth rates, and post-birth conditions are clearly a critical part of the equation. Young people already face mounting barriers to starting a family, ranging from the unaffordability of housing to concerns around the state of the world their children will inherit.

Reforming the system so that it truly values and supports new families, regardless of their employment status, is an important first step in reversing this trend.

Constituents have raised this matter with me on a number of occasions and, since the majority have been women, I intend to focus today’s speech on their stories, and the issue of maternity pay in particular.

Lindsay wrote to me earlier this year; she works in the third sector, and her husband works for the council. Neither of their employers could afford to top up their pay when they took leave to have their child, and this left the family in an extremely vulnerable position, during a critical time.

Lindsay got in touch before the April uplift, but her point still stands: statutory maternity pay, after the first six weeks, is less than half of the national living wage. Parenting and living on this wage is clearly not possible.

I understand that a balance must be struck, which takes into account the impact that extended periods of absence will have on our economy, but other countries – notably the Scandinavians – seem able to offer generous benefits for new parents and absorb the “productivity” losses.

Alongside this issue, I have to highlight another constituent’s story: Blanche is self-employed, and therefore found herself in an even more precarious position when she had a child.

Because she works for herself, she was only entitled to the statutory allowance – a flat rate of around £187 a week – with no six week cushion, unlike statutory maternity pay. As a result, she had to work right up until the morning she went into labour (at 41 weeks pregnant), and then returned to work almost instantly, after using up her in Keep in Touch days.

To quote her directly, and I will warn members that this is an unembellished description of her experience – “it was a shock to the system, her body was sore, her breasts were leaking, she was still bleeding”, and she had to work in this condition.

Alongside the physical and logistical difficulties she also felt stigmatised, by medical staff and other parents, who judged her for leaving her child to return to work so early, without understanding she was forced to, by her financial situation.

In Blanche’s own words: “it wasn’t MY decision to return to work so quickly. I felt I had to. Life is expensive, having a new baby is expensive. And because the weekly statutory maternity allowance is so low compared to the cost of living, it didn’t feel like I had another choice.”

Having to prioritise work through this life-altering event must have been incredibly challenging, and I am in awe of the courage and strength of will she showed throughout this period.

Across Europe and beyond, governments have shown that it doesn’t have to be this way. In Sweden, both parents receive up to 390 days of paid leave at around 80% of previous earnings; in Norway, parents can take either 49 weeks at 100% pay or 59 weeks at 80% pay under national insurance, and in Germany, self-employed parents are eligible for a parental allowance at roughly 65 % of prior net earnings.

These examples prove that another approach is possible, and the onus is on us, as a society, to recognise that mothers, and fathers, should not have to suffer financially if they want to spend time with their newborns.

I checked in with Blanche last weekend to make sure she was happy for me to share her story and she told me she’s thinking about having another child, but understandably, she’s nervous about how she’ll manage. She ended our conversation with these words:

“Hopefully by that point, things will change. If not for me, for future freelance mothers out there.”

We need to make sure that change happens.