A Private Member’s Bill is seeking to end women on maternity leave being forced into redundancy. The Bill comes after an investigation found that women on maternity leave are being denied their rights under the Maternity and Paternity Leave Regulations 1999 by being forced out of their jobs.
Currently, women on maternity leave are entitled to be offered (before the end of her employment under her existing contract) alternative employment. Employers are meant to ensure the work is appropriate and not substantially worse than their previous role.
However, since 2015, an investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Committee has found that many new mothers are facing redundancy. They found that “around 54,000 new mothers may be forced out of their jobs in Britain each year”.
The Government responded to these findings by launching a consultation on pregnancy and maternity discrimination.
Following this, the government pledged to extend redundancy protections meaning employees could not be made redundant from the time they told their employers they were pregnant, until six months after their maternity leave had finished. This applied to adoption and shared parental leave.
Despite this pledge being made in 2019, it is yet to be introduced. Although, the Protection from Redundancy (Pregnancy and Family Leave) Bill 2022-23 was presented as a Private Member’s Bill on 15th June 2022.
This Bill differs in that it grants the Secretary of State the power to extend protections against redundancy for longer periods of time for reasons relating to pregnancy, as well as adoption and shared parental leave.
The Bill would also extend the current regulations in the Employment Rights Act 1996 which grant the Secretary of State the powers to determine the periods of maternity leave to periods “during or after” a “protected period of pregnancy”.
The full report can be read here.
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