Maternity benefit is an insult

As soon as I started IVF treatment, I opened a savings account and called it “Maternity Fund.” I knew that if I was lucky enough to get pregnant, I would have to start saving now to pay for my future maternity leave.

Maternity pay in the UK is one of the lowest in Europe, so when Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch suggested in an interview with Times Radio last week that maternity pay was “excessive” and that parents should “take over greater personal responsibility” – I became furious.

When I got pregnant in 2019, I was lucky that both my husband and I were graduates and had a relatively secure income. However, going on holiday meant that, as a self-employed freelance writer, I would survive on maternity pay – which was then around £650 a month – for nine months.

Doing the math, I realized that I would need to save around £1,000 upfront for each month I planned to leave to cover the difference between my maternity pay and the amount needed to cover half of my mortgage and bills.

This meant that for most of my pregnancy I had no choice but to fight off nausea and fatigue, working as hard as I could. I took extra shifts, working 11-hour days most days, and then sometimes returned to my desk to do more in the evenings and weekends.

My husband and I were both saving several hundred pounds a month, but the stress of working so much took a toll on me during my pregnancy.

We pay the rest to the “maternity fund”. In an ideal world, we would have replaced my old car before the baby was born, but it just wasn’t feasible. I searched Facebook Marketplace for things I needed for my baby and gladly accepted maternity and children’s clothes from my friends.

Even with our best efforts, we couldn’t save enough for me to take a full year off. So, like three in five mothers surveyed by the charity Maternity Action, I had no choice but to plan to return to work earlier than I wanted when my baby was just six months old. My income still hasn’t returned to normal.

Badenoch referred to statutory maternity pay, which can be claimed by women who are employed and earn at least £123 a week for up to 39 weeks of maternity leave. It is paid by the employer, who requests its return from the State Treasury.

Women receive 90% of their earnings for the first six weeks, then receive up to £184.03 a week until the end of their leave. Not everyone is eligible, except women working on a zero-hours contract or changing employers while pregnant.

Self-employed parents, like me, claim an equivalent called Maternity Benefit, which pays £184.03 from the first week. Statutory Maternity Pay is currently around £800 a month. The idea that this is “excessive” is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

According to Maternity Action, women should live on an income that is less than half the minimum wage or equivalent to just over a third of women’s average weekly earnings in the UK during maternity leave.

The idea that we need to take “more personal responsibility” for the costs of having children is laughable. Most parents I know are already strategically preparing for maternity leave by doing extra work and saving what they can.

For example, my friend Anna* is an NHS doctor who took on extra night shifts during her pregnancy – despite health problems – to increase her income for her upcoming holiday.

Lucy* and her partner, who earn an average household income, had to rely on their savings and credit card to get through maternity leave with their second child. Even then, she returned to work a month early because she couldn’t afford to stay at home.

“Maternity leave has been proven to significantly reduce infant mortality while improving women’s mental and physical health. This is good for productivity in the UK and reduces public health costs,” says Joeli Brearley of the campaign group Pregnant and Then Screwed. “Most families need two incomes to survive, so without statutory maternity pay, women would be forced to return to work almost immediately after giving birth.”

Kemi Badenoch has now claimed her comments were “misled”, telling reporters she believed maternity pay “doesn’t need change at all”.

But he is wrong about this too – it must necessarily increase. Statutory maternity pay of £800 a month still does not cover half of the basic monthly expenses of many British families.

In my case, I ended up taking about nine months of leave due to daycare closures, which was almost affordable thanks to the money we saved by not paying for childcare.

Because of course, low maternity pay is only the beginning when it comes to the financial impact of having children.

Exorbitant childcare costs (our nursery bills have peaked at £1,100 a month) and the need to reduce my working hours to care for my son mean that my income remains lower than before I became a parent.

Earlier this year, headlines were filled with hand-wringing news that the UK birth rate had fallen to a record low. Although I cannot have more children for health reasons, if I had the choice, the cost would be a major deterrent.

If politicians like Badenoch really want to see an improvement in birth rates, they need to stop financially penalizing us for having children and start recognizing that supporting families is absolutely essential to our economy and the future of our country.

*Names have been changed