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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, further to the Answer of 9 February 2021 to Question 146798 on Paternity Leave, how many people received statutory shared parental pay in (a) Quarter 3 and (b) Quarter 4 of 2020-21.

Shared Parental Leave (SPL) and Pay was introduced in December 2014 for the parents of children due or adopted from 5 April 2015. The scheme enables eligible working parents to share up to 50 weeks of leave and up to 37 weeks of pay in the first year, where the mother does not intend to use her full maternity entitlements.

Information provided by employers to HMRC in respect of claims for Statutory Shared Parental Pay (ShPP) indicates that 4,100 individuals were in receipt of ShPP in Quarter 3 of 2020-21, and 3,300 individuals were in receipt of ShPP in Quarter 4 (January and February only) of 2020-21.

Please note that HMRC does not hold information which calculates the total duration of ShPP received by individual claimants. However, the following table sets out the number of individuals in receipt of ShPP in 2019-20 by the number of months in the year that they made a claim:

Please note:

1. The data collected uses HMRC Real Time Information (RTI) system and was extracted in May 2021. RTI is subject to revision or updates, and so there may be small fluctuations in figures reported, and these figures should not be considered “final”.
2. Figures have been rounded to the nearest hundred.
3. The number of individuals in receipt of ShPP per quarter are based on the total number of individuals in that quarter irrespective of when the payment first started. Quarterly figures should not be added together to make a yearly count of individuals in receipt of ShPP due to double counting claimants from quarter to quarter.
4. “Number of months claimed” counts each month the same individual was in receipt of ShPP in a given tax year (2019-20). This should not be interpreted as the total duration of pay received. Where individuals are in receipt of pay that spans two financial years HMRC data can only count the period within a single year and where individuals have received pay spanning months, however briefly, will be recorded as two months.
5. This data represents individuals in receipt of Shared Parental Pay only, so those who take unpaid Shared Parental Leave are not included.