Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what recent steps the Government has taken to ensure that couples sign up to the Shared Parental Leave scheme.

The Government has run significant communications campaigns to promote Shared Parental Leave to parents and employers. We are also currently developing a new online tool to help parents plan Shared Parental Leave and Pay. The tool will be available in the coming months and will make it easier for parents to access the scheme.

In addition, the Government is currently evaluating the Shared Parental Leave and Pay scheme in order to better understand the barriers and enablers to parents taking Shared Parental Leave. This evaluation has included commissioning and interrogating information collected through large scale, representative, surveys of employers and parents and a qualitative study of parents who have used the scheme. We intend to publish our findings later this year.