Clause 3 - Additional paternity leave: adoption
Work and Families Bill
12:00 pm
Eleanor Laing (Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, Scotland; Epping Forest, Conservative)
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Burnley (Kitty Ussher) for tabling the amendment and speaking to it so eloquently. It raises an important issue about the way in which the Bill is designed to operate. It comes back again to flexibility, choice and the fact that each family is different. The hon. Lady herself is a good example of what I am talking about, and having been in a similar position I have every sympathy with her. As Members of Parliament, we are fortunate; although we work very long hours in comparison with the average, we have a bit of flexibility in how we arrange our days and weeks. In our job, it is possible to give birth to a baby, look after it and continue working. I was amazed to find that that was possible. I am sure that the hon. Lady has much more confidence than I, but somehow or other I have managed to muddle my way through and I now have a happy, healthy four-year-old.
I am sure that the hon. Lady will agree that flexibility and choice are vital. As she was explaining why she tabled her amendment and the possibilities that could arise, something occurred to me: what if the mother of a new baby became ill? That is not unusual. Last week, I had a meeting with the Epping Forest mental health trust and we discussed where its resources should be used and so on. I discovered that the incidence of post-natal depression is much higher than anyone imagines.
I am sure that we can all think of cases in which, for some reason or other, mothers simply cannot look after their babies and need help. In such cases, the natural next person to look after the child is its father, so the Bill should make provision for a father to begin looking after a child as soon as it is born. Perhaps the mother will not have gone back to work, but is ill and unable to look after her child—I use post-natal depression only as an example; there are all sorts of ways in which that could happen. That the father is not able to take paternity leave immediately, should that be necessary, simply does not make sense. The hon. Lady’s amendment and the others in this group are therefore worthy of consideration.
I am sure that the Minister will consider the points made in the spirit in which they are meant. In my case, I want to improve the Bill, not change the intention behind it or increase costs and complicate matters for employers, especially small employers. I simply want to give flexibility and choice, so that any family can respond at any time to the circumstances in which it finds itself.