Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many women claimed statutory (a) maternity pay and (b) maternity allowance in Scotland in each of the last five years.

Statutory Maternity Pay is delivered through HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), rather than the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Figures provided by HMRC on the number of new claims for Statutory Maternity Pay in Scotland in each financial year from 2019/20 to 2023/24 are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. The number of Statutory Maternity Pay spells starting in Scotland in financial year

Statistics on the number of Maternity Allowance spells starting in each quarter in Scotland from February 2010 to November 2023 are published and can be found at Maternity Allowance: quarterly statistics - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). The latest release covers September – November 2023 and data from March 2019 – November 2023 are shown in Table 2. These figures are based on a 5% sample of Maternity Allowance Claims and should be treated with caution. This is because a recent review determined that the available sample used to estimate the Maternity Allowance statistics at a regional level was too small to provide a sufficient level of confidence.

Table 2. The number of Maternity Allowance spells starting in Scotland in each quarter

Notes

1. Figures for Statutory Maternity Pay are rounded to the nearest hundred and figures for Maternity Allowance are rounded to the nearest ten.
2. Figures for Statutory Maternity Allowance were collected using HMRC Real Time Information (RTI) and were extracted in August 2024. RTI is subject to revision or updates. The location of the claim is based on the taxpayers’ residential address as recorded on RTI.
3. It is not possible to identify when an employee has started a second claim for Statutory Maternity pay within twelve months from the data so these figures may exclude a small number of claims where someone has given birth twice within a twelve month period.
4. Figures for Maternity Allowance should be treated with caution because they are based on a sample of Maternity Allowance claims that has since been found to be too small to provide a sufficient level of confidence. They also exclude a small proportion of clerical cases.
5. Maternity Allowance statistics for March - May 2022 were not published as planned due to a data production error so no figures are provided for this time period.