Statutory Menstrual Leave

Debate between Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Kirsteen Sullivan

Monday 13th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Clapham and Brixton Hill) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Paul Davies) for his opening remarks, and for his compassion and solidarity. He is absolutely right that every man should have a say in these issues and challenge them. As well as the fact that nearly half the global population will menstruate at some point in their lifetime, and on any given day 850 million people across the world are menstruating, we are all here because a woman somewhere had a menstrual cycle, so it is a concern for absolutely everybody.

For something so universal, menstruation remains shrouded in coded language, embarrassment and unnecessary shame. We call it “the time of month”, “the painters are in”, “my cousin has come to stay”—anything but what it actually is. We pass around tampons and pads as if they are some sort of contraband that no one should see. That evasion is not accidental: it is the product of centuries of conditioning that told women their bodies were problems to be managed in silence and shame.

Listening to my fellow hon. Friends speaking about their own experience, all I keep thinking is that, if young women had been flagged when they had painful periods, things would have been different for a lot of the conditions we are talking about, certainly in terms of the length of time to diagnosis. I am really pleased to contribute to this debate and support statutory menstrual leave, not as a radical policy but as a practical, compassionate and long-overdue step towards a fairer and healthier working society.

We already see where progress has been made and where things have been championed in this House. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Ms Oppong-Asare) on the ten-minute rule Bill she introduced recently and her consistent campaigning for improved endometriosis care. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bathgate and Linlithgow (Kirsteen Sullivan) on her work as the chair of the APPG on endometriosis. All that work matters and it is making a difference.

Scotland became the first country in the world to legislate for free menstrual products, and across the UK we rightly abolished VAT on sanitary products in 2021, finally ending the so-called tampon tax. Steps like those matter, but they are not the end of the journey—not by a long way. Here is the truth: we have made it cheaper to menstruate, but we have not made it safe to admit that someone is struggling because of it.

Menstrual stigma continues to socially condition people to conceal their pain, push through it and stay silent at work. The cost of that silence is not abstract; for those living with endometriosis, dysmenorrhoea, adenomyosis or premenstrual dysphoric disorder, that silence means working through debilitating pain or losing earnings when they cannot, and in some cases losing jobs altogether. Those are real conditions. They are painful and often severe, and they exist within a system where female reproductive health has been chronically under-researched, underfunded and far too often dismissed.

[Kirsteen Sullivan]

My hon. Friend is making a very powerful point. Does she agree that the impact on women’s mental health is rarely spoken about? Women feel ignored and dismissed, but they are living in constant pain and the anticipation of it, which just wears them down. The mental health point is rarely acknowledged but must be addressed.

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I say that as someone who lives with endometriosis and constantly experiences that pain, thinking about what I can and cannot do, and what I will be able to manage this week or that week. I know what it is to sit in a meeting, stand through our many votes and carry on a role that demands my full presence when my body is screaming otherwise. I know from listening to other Members and so many different women speaking about it that I am far from alone.

It is not a competition of who receives more health funding, but we have to say that men have won consistently. When my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington) was speaking, I looked up some figures for the amount of investment into things such as Viagra. Everyone should look at them when they can; they are shocking in comparison with what is spent on certain things in men’s and women’s health. Let us be honest about what that under-investment has cost us: endometriosis alone affects around 1.5 million people in the UK, taking an average of nearly nine years to diagnose, as we have heard. That is not a gap in the system, but a failure of the system; it is a failure rooted in a long-standing tendency to deprioritise women’s pain.

Statutory menstrual leave would allow someone to take time off when they were genuinely unable to work due to menstruation, without fear of judgment, without risking their job security and without having to lie about why they are absent. Crucially, it would also begin to normalise the conversation and to challenge the stigma rather than reinforce it, because the answer to workplace discrimination is never to remain invisible.

As we have heard, menstrual leave policies already exist across the globe: in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Zambia, Mexico and, most recently, Portugal. They are not fringe experiments, but functioning workplace policies in countries with vastly different cultures and economies. The evidence that this is workable is already there. Here at home, our Employment Rights Act has introduced major reforms, including a day one right to sick pay. Menstrual leave would sit naturally alongside those changes if we were to implement it; it is consistent with the direction of travel and is the next logical step.

The policy also offers vital protection for those who are too often overlooked, including transgender men and non-binary and gender-diverse people who menstruate. For many, disclosure of menstrual status can expose them to discrimination or worse. A clear statutory framework would provide safety, privacy and the reassurance that their needs were seen and protected by law.

There are those who argue that menstrual leave would undermine women in the workplace, and that employers would discriminate against people who menstruate when hiring. I take that concern seriously, but that argument has been made against every single piece of workplace equality legislation in history: it was made against maternity leave, it was made against equal pay, and it was made against flexible working. In every case, the answer was not to abandon the protection, but to make the legal framework strong enough to prevent the discrimination. That is what we have to do here too.

The ultimate goal is job security, wellbeing and genuine equality. Menstrual leave alone will not get us all the way there, but it is a serious, evidence-backed and compassionate step in the right direction. I urge this House to take it.