Covid-19: Maternity and Parental Leave

John Howell Excerpts

Monday 5th October 2020 Westminster Hall

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I hope that nobody will take that advice as a reason to have a go at me—but if they do, they do.

I am delighted to participate in this debate, and I thank the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) for initiating it. I want to raise just three points, and I do so in the spirit of asking the Minister to look again to make sure that we are doing everything possible to ensure that everything works extremely well.

The first point relates to childcare. I fully accept that childcare is desperately important to ensure that there is the opportunity for people on maternity or paternity leave to go back to work. I fully accept that, but I pick up the point made by the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) and by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton): it is very important for the children themselves. I, too, have come across children who were born during or just before the lockdown period, but who have been immersed in lockdown, who find it really difficult to engage not just with other children, but with anyone outside their immediate family. That is such a sad thing to experience. I am not quite sure what the answer is, except to build in flexibility and make sure that we have the right sort of understanding people running nurseries.

The second group of people that I ask the Minister to look at, to see whether we are doing the right thing for them, is the self-employed. There are a large number of self-employed people here in the UK, but we know that there are certain things that we have not done right. Can it be right that just under half of self-employed people have had to give up a place at nursery in order to carry on making a living? Can it be right that we ask the self-employed to take into account things that other people, particularly those who are employed, do not have to take into account?

My final point is about those people who are employed. I know that the Minister or one of his associates has raised the question of how companies deal with people who are on maternity or paternity leave. However, as many speakers have suggested, it is still an area that is open to abuse. For example, we still see a large number of suspensions being done on incorrect terms. We also still see a large number of people who are employed in unsafe conditions. I wonder whether it is worth our getting together a group of leaders in this field to make sure that the key messages that we want to get across are really understood and communicated across companies, so that they do things in the right way. We are not asking for anything special, but we are asking that things be done in the right way.