Government launches review of parental leave regime

9 July 2025 3 min read

By Rachel Chapman

At a glance

The UK government has initiated an 18-month review of all parental leave and pay entitlements.
The review is based on the aims of improving maternal health, supporting economic growth through better labour market participation, ensuring the best start in life for children, and enhancing childcare flexibility.
Following a June 2025 report, the Women and Equalities Select Committee (WESC) urged reforms such as increasing paternity pay to match maternity pay, extending paid leave, and simplifying shared parental leave.
The Employment Rights Bill (ERB) will introduce several reforms, including making paternity and unpaid parental leave a ‘day one’ right and enhancing protections for pregnant women and new mothers.

The government has launched a comprehensive review of the system of parental leave and pay entitlement, publishing terms of reference for the review and a call for evidence. All current and upcoming parental leave and pay entitlements will be in scope of the review, namely:

Maternity leave and pay.
Paternity leave and pay.
Adoption leave and pay.
Shared parental leave and pay.
Parental bereavement leave and pay.
Parental leave (unpaid).
Neonatal care leave and pay.
Maternity Allowance.

Bereaved partner’s paternity leave (unpaid) is in development and the government aims to bring the entitlement into force in 2026.

The objectives against which government will consider the current system and the case for change of any future reform are:

Maternal health: Support the physical and mental health, recovery and wellbeing of women during pregnancy and post-partum by giving them sufficient time away from work with an appropriate level of pay
Economic growth through labour market participation: Support economic growth by enabling more parents to stay in work and advance in their careers after starting a family, particularly to improve both women’s labour market outcomes and the gender pay gap, reduce the ‘motherhood penalty’, and harness benefits for employers
Best start in life: Ensure sufficient resources and time away from work to support new and expectant parents’ wellbeing and facilitate the best start in life for babies and young children, supporting health and development outcomes
Childcare: Support parents to make balanced childcare choices that work for their family situation, including enabling co-parenting, and provide flexibility to reflect the realities of modern work and childcare needs

The review launched on 1 July 2025 and is expected to run for 18 months.

The review follows a June 2025 report from the WESC which stated that that the statutory parental leave system does not support working families and has fallen far behind most comparable countries. The WESC made a number of recommendations including:

A key aim of the government’s review of the parental leave system must be to incentivise greater gender equality in parenting responsibilities and as a vital part of achieving this the government should consider raising paternity pay to the level of maternity pay in the first six weeks ie 90% of average earnings with a view to phased introduction of increases to statutory pay across the system, to bring rates for all working parents up to 80% or more of average earnings or the real Living Wage.
Legislating for a day one right to paid paternity leave.
Increasing paid statutory paternity leave to six weeks.
Considering options for providing statutory paid leave for all self-employed and non-employee working fathers as part of its review of the parental leave system.
Simplifying shared parental leave.
Extending entitlement to parental leaves.

Changes to improve the parental leave system are already underway and will be delivered through the ERB. The ERB will: