Clause 1 - Maternity pay period
Work and Families Bill
11:15 am
Meg Munn (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department of Trade and Industry; Sheffield, Heeley, Labour)
We will discuss in a moment the difficulties of calculation and the impact of that on business and maternity payments, but this comes down to principles. The first principle is that maternity pay is wage replacement. We know that, setting out from that basis, families can calculate their financial situations and how much money they will have a week to manage their new situation. As for the level of maternity pay, I say to the hon. Member for North Norfolk that that has increased—the amount is somewhere among the deluge of bits of papers that I have been helpfully been provided with; ah, here it is—from £60.20 in 2001 to £106 now. That is a 70 per cent. increase. We should welcome that. In addition, there are other children’s benefits. That is the principle; I will come to the impact that the amendments would have on business.
Another consequence of the amendment—I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting referred to this and used the term “windfall” in the first place, but I do not want to be the referee of a dispute across the Committee—would be that a woman who took only the compulsory two weeks after the birth would be entitled to receive 39 weeks’ pay for those two weeks. That means that a woman who earns over £30,000 a year could receive over £6,000 in statutory maternity pay for those two weeks, and then return to work and continue to receive her normal salary. The Government would fund at least 92 per cent. of the payment for those two weeks—the hon. Member for Epping Forest has, rightly, constantly reminded me over the past three or four weeks of the importance of taking care of public money, although it might seem like six weeks to her—and the woman’s employer would have to fund 8 per cent. of that payment and continue to pay her salary or wages when she returned to work.