When my son was born, I got six weeks paternity leave, on full pay – and they were some of the best weeks of my life.
Don't get me wrong: it wasn’t plain sailing. My son struggled to feed and lost a worrying amount of weight. He wouldn’t sleep in his cot either, so one of us had to hold him round the clock. But it meant I got to spend the nights bonding with this tiny, miraculous baby sleeping on my chest. I had time to learn how to look after him, and could be there to support my wife through the challenges of establishing feeding.
After two weeks, I remember thinking, 'there's no way I could go back to work yet'. But that's exactly what the vast majority of new fathers and co-parents in the UK have to do. Our statutory paternity leave is the worst in Europe: two weeks paid at less than half the minimum wage. Self-employed people get nothing at all.
The cost is enormous. New mothers are left alone while still physically recovering from birth. Fathers miss irreplaceable bonding time with their babies, and many parents get pushed into traditional 'homemaker mum, breadwinner dad' roles they never wanted. A third take no leave at all, and 50% of those who do, fall into financial hardship.
It's striking how out of step our policies are with the British public's attitudes on parenting today. New polling commissioned for us by Movember found that 86% of people believe it's better when both parents can be equally active caregivers to their children. This isn't just a view held by metropolitan professionals, either – the support spans age groups, income brackets, and political affiliations.
When we launched The Dad Shift campaign in September by putting baby slings on famous statues, we were taken aback by the scale of the public response. It shows the chasm between what parents want – dads playing a bigger role in childcare – and what our policies actually allow. As one put it, 'we wanted to do everything equally - but one day we woke up and found ourselves in the 1950s'.
Why does this matter? Because when fathers are actively involved from the start, everyone benefits. Children do better at school and have better emotional development. Improved paternity leave has brought down the gender pay gap in other countries, and mothers' careers and mental health improve when childcare is shared. Finally, fathers themselves lead longer, happier lives when they're more involved parents.
The previous government's attempted solution, Shared Parental Leave (SPL), has comprehensively failed families. Less than 2% of parents use it, and the system has become startlingly elitist. Just 100 dads in the bottom third of incomes managed to take it last year, while 60% of claims come from the top 20% of earners. SPL is a fundamentally broken policy: it’s too poorly paid, it forces dads to take leave from mums, and it’s too complicated.
The evidence from other countries is clear: if we want dads to be more involved in parenting, we need longer, better paid leave that’s reserved for fathers. Spain shows what's possible. They recently went from two weeks to 16 weeks at full pay, with such success that both major political parties now want to extend it even further.
Labour has committed to reviewing parental leave in their first year in office. It must lead to a new, better paternity leave policy that matches Britain's values - one where every father can be there for their kids, no matter what job they do or how much they earn. Our children deserve nothing less.
_Alex Lloyd Hunter, co-founder of The Dadshift – a group of men, dads and co-parents campaigning for better paternity leave in the UK.
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