Clause 1 - Paternity leave
Employment Bill
11:00 am
Mr Alan Johnson (Minister of State (Employment and the Regions), Department of Trade and Industry; Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle, Labour)
Amendment No. 119 relates to an area on which we touched in discussing amendment No. 103. As we said then, our approach is to avoid imposing on employers the delicate task of trying to check whether an employee is to be the father of a child not yet born. That is unprovable; instead, we want to provide for employees to sign a self-certificate asserting their eligibility for paternity leave. That is the sort of evidence that we see employees providing to their employers. Paragraph (a) will allow us to make that provision.
We will also be able to specify matters such as the advance notice that an employee must give an employer. In most cases, it will be 15 weeks before the baby is due, as we have already discussed. I hope that we can agree that it would be wrong to remove paragraph (a).