I live in London and I’m in my early thirties, which means that most of the women I know are having babies. First babies, second babies, IVF babies, ‘we weren’t quite ready but we’re excited anyway’ babies. And while every child and every pregnancy is different, the one thing that every pregnant friend has in common is worry.
But it’s not just worry about becoming a mum or sleep deprivation or having to give birth – it's about how they’re going to survive maternity leave. This is why I was apoplectically angry this weekend to hear Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch making some spectacularly ignorant comments about business regulation, specifically maternity pay.
Badenoch has since claimed that her comments were ‘misunderstood’ and ‘taken out of context’ – so let’s look at a direct, verbatim quote from her interview, during which she said: “Maternity pay varies, depending on who you work for. But statutory maternity pay is a function of tax, tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This, in my view, is excessive… Businesses are closing, businesses are not starting in the UK, because they say that the burden of regulation is too high.”
She was then asked again if she thought that maternity pay is excessive, to which she replied: “I think it’s gone too far the other way, in terms of general business regulation. We need to allow businesses, especially small businesses, to make more of those decisions… The exact amount of maternity pay, in my view, is neither here nor there. We need to make sure that we are creating an environment where people can work and people can have more freedom to make their own decisions.”
When it was then suggested that women would be unable to have babies without maternity provision, she replied: “We need to have more personal responsibility. There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies.”
It is worth noting that while Kemi didn’t attach any specifics to ‘the time’ when people were having more babies but didn’t have maternity pay, maternity pay has existed since 1911 and has been enforced in the current iteration since 1987. Women having ‘more babies’ historically is generally understood to relate to a lack of reliable or accessible birth control.
The disastrous interview shines a spotlight on something important. Maternity pay is a massively misunderstood arrangement, and there seems to be an idea that tiny businesses are being forced to pay dozens of women their full salaries while they’re off on their baby holiday. All of which is a) very sexist and b) patently untrue.
In the UK, if you’re up to date with your National Insurance payment, and you’re an employee of a company, you’re entitled to six weeks of pay at 90% of your full salary. After that, you get £185 a week. All of this is paid for by the government, out of taxes that you and every other taxpayer has contributed. Your employer doesn’t have to pay anything – in fact, if they’re a small business they can actually reclaim 103% of what they paid you, making a small profit to help with the admin costs. Your employer is obliged to facilitate your return to work after twelve months (or after nine months, if you only take the 39 weeks statutory paid maternity leave). This is not a staggeringly generous offering. It’s worse than many European countries, though admittedly better than the US, where women are regularly back at work while still bleeding postpartum.
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Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Kemi’s stance on maternity provision is that it’s fundamentally illogical. There are constant headlines about a looming birth crisis in the UK, with fewer women having babies and couples increasingly opting to have one child rather than two. Experts like to sit around scratching their heads about how to inform macro population issues like a birth crisis, when really they should get down to the nearest soft play and ask some women what they would need in order to have more children. I guarantee they’d tell you that if you made having kids a bit easier and more affordable they’d at least consider it.
Maternity leave has the potential to be a genuinely magical time – an inducement to put a pin in your career and have another child, even. In theory it's a little bubble for you and your baby, for bonding and learning and growing. With the right support then you should be able to sit on the sofa drinking in the newborn cuddles, getting to know your new baby, in between long walks in the park and coffee shop meet-ups with mum friends.
But anyone who’s tried to survive on £185 will tell you that the constant worry about money can – and will – ruin the new mum's experience. The average monthly mortgage cost in the UK is £1444, which means that your maternity pay would just about cover half of the mortgage. That’s without bills, food, nappies, formula, let alone the bits which make maternity leave an enjoyable experience like baby classes and coffees. Women all over the UK find themselves taking their older children out of their established nursery or childminder routines while they’re on maternity leave, to save money.
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I’ve watched every woman I love wrestle with the balance of their finances and their fertility, saving before trying to conceive while being bombarded with scary messages about their egg reserves. They take ‘personal responsibility’ as Kemi so charmingly put it, but it’s not possible for the average couple to save a year’s worth of salary, while buying everything they need for a child and keeping a roof over their heads. When I got pregnant I had £40,000 in savings. By the time my daughter turned two I had almost nothing.
In 2023, the charity Pregnant then Screwed found that 25% of women had gone without food while on maternity leave in order to feed their children. So to hear Kemi Badenoch – who has had two children, an impressive career and a high-earning investment banker husband – suggest that the meagre support available to those women is ‘excessive’ is genuinely staggering.
The only silver lining to this whole debacle is that it seems to have put a serious hole in Badenoch’s leadership campaign. It feels very odd to look at a woman competing for a traditionally male-dominated job and want her to lose to a man. But I’m afraid there’s no coming back from her comments. Suggesting that women who are doing one of the hardest jobs on earth deserve less support is an unforgivable misreading of the room.
Plus, I know a whole lot more about my hormones than I used to.
