The government’s paternity leave proposals, currently being prepared for the forthcoming Work and Families Bill, have come under attack from those who will be carrying the cost: employers. The government’s plan is to give fathers a standard three months of statutory paid leave and a further three months unpaid. Additionally, new policy will enable mothers to transfer some of their entitlement to the father of their baby. The problem with all this is that employers are worried that the arrangements will be open to abuse. According to Meg Munn, Minister for Women: “Businesses are concerned that while women claiming maternity leave are obviously pregnant, they can’t tell with fathers. Fathers may or may not be married and may or may not be living with them.” And as the Sunday Times pointed out, with the number of births outside marriage now as high as 42%, determining fatherhood is a much harder task. And of course the other issue, also pointed out in the Sunday Times, is that even when a man is genuinely the biological father, how can we be sure that he will use his paternity leave to be paternal?
Clearly these issues concerning the rights and responsibilities of fathers call into question an awful lot more than the practicalities involved in paternity leave arrangements. In fact, without wanting to put a dampener on paternity leave plans, baring in mind the current two-week paternity leave take-up (less than 50%), the wider issue of modern fatherhood is rather more pressing than potential false-father fraud. Meg Munn described the problems around identifying fathers and ensuring proper use of paternity leave as ‘technical’. But far from being just a technical glitch, the underlying issue of paternal responsibility is a very serious contemporary social problem. Fathers are becoming increasingly divorced from parenting, particularly affected - as well as fuelled - by a rising trend of lone motherhood. For every television programme and broadsheet article about middle-class men quitting their jobs to father, in another socio-economic realm a melange of high levels of family breakdown, non-committed partnership and an inefficient Child Support Agency leads to yet another fatherless family.
Current government policy is greatly undermining the role of fathers in parenting, both directly and inadvertently: benign but backfiring policy – subsidising lone-parenthood; inefficient policy – insufficiently draconian child maintenance laws; and narrow-minded policy – not accommodating (and thereby not incentivising) couple families in the tax and benefit system and supporting only institutionalised forms of childcare. The impact of policy is greatest on those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale. The number of non-resident and unmarried fathers, not simply by coincidence, is also concentrated at the lower end of the socio-economic scale.
So realistically, the problem of these ‘unofficial’ fathers, faux or real, taking paternity leave is pretty slim. Those who can afford to take a six-month salary reduction are infinitely more likely to be the middle and upper classes – who, statistically, are infinitely more likely to be married. Thus the technical problem which needs addressing is rather government family policy.