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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to protect women’s rights in the workplace.

The Government remains committed to bringing forward measures to further improve women’s rights in the workplace as soon as parliamentary time allows. These measures include:

• extending redundancy protections for women after they return from maternity leave;
• introducing a new duty on employers to take steps to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as explicit protections against workplace harassment by third parties;
• introducing neonatal leave and pay; and
• introducing a new right to one week of unpaid carer’s leave.

The Government has also recently consulted on measures to reform the right to request flexible working and will publish a response to that in due course.