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 he has taken to ensure parents on parental leave are adequately supported on their return to the workplace.

Existing parental leave rights give employees who have taken parental leave the right to return to the same or similar job. For example, a woman has the right to return to the same job after ordinary maternity leave (the first 26 weeks of leave). The Government has committed, when Parliamentary time allows, to extend redundancy protections into a period of return to work for particular forms of parental leave. The Government announced a Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) returners programme on International Women's Day to encourage those who have taken breaks to care for others back into STEM, building on previous Government returner initiatives.