26 April 2001 - The parental leave entitlement of parents with disabled children
is to be increased from 13 to 18 weeks. Trade and Industry Secretary Stephen Byers also announced that
all parents with children under five will soon be able to take parental leave.
Parents in receipt of Disability Living Allowance will
be entitled to take 18 weeks' parental leave from work up until the child's
18th birthday. The leave can be taken flexibly in blocks of a day
or more, amounting to no more than 4 weeks in total each year. Timing of the leave
must be agreed with the employer and notice has to be given. The new arrangement comes into
force 'later this year'.
Stephen Byers said:
"As standards of living improve, quality of life becomes an issue for
us all. The way society treats parents is at the heart of that.
"This new leave will make a real difference to thousands of families
with children suffering from a disability who need more time and
greater flexibility to deal with the considerable pressures they
face.
"Often, children with a disability have to attend more medical
appointments than other children and this can be especially difficult
for parents trying to balance their child's needs with the pressures
of holding down a job. This announcement will be of real benefit to
hard working parents who have the extra responsibility of bringing up
a child with a disability."
Also commenting on the extension of parental leave to parents Stephen
Byers said:
"In our recent consultation, parents have told us that extending
parental leave to all those with pre-school children would make a
real difference to their daily struggle of balancing work and family
responsibilities.
"Parental leave was a totally new concept in the UK when it was first
introduced at the end of 1999. It was important to introduce the
right with a 'light-touch' approach to give employers time to
understand it and its implications.
"It has worked well and the time is now right to extend parental
leave to all parents with children under five."
Until now only parents of children born after December 15 1999 have been
eligible to take up to 13 weeks' unpaid leave in the United Kingdom. Every other EU governments
gave this right to ALL existing parents - the Irish government following suit only after being
told by the European Commission that it would be in breach of EU law.
The consequence of the UK government's exemption has been that around 2.7 million working
parents with children born before the abitrary cut-off have been excluded from rights enjoyed
by citizens of all other states in the EU. According to TUC estimates, about half a million
British parents have missed out on parental leave rights as their children have reached the
age of five.
Commenting on the government's announcement on parental leave TUC
General Secretary, John Monks, said:
"This looks like a climb down by the government and a victory for the TUC and Britain's
working parents.
"We are currently negotiating with the government at their request to try to ensure that
the regulations implementing this decision will allow us to drop the TUC's challenge in
the European Court next week, where our legal team is to be headed by Cherie Booth QC.
Every legal expert has warned the government that defeat was inevitable.
Next Thursday (3 May) the TUC was due at the ECJ, when five European judges were to listen to
arguments put forward by the TUC and the government over the way the Parental Leave
Regulations were introduced in the UK.
John Monks continued: "There are serious questions to be asked about why the government denied 2.7 million working
parents their rights for eighteen months. It is good that the government has gone beyond EU
law by giving extra leave to the parents of the disabled.
"We hope this will put an end to attempts to water down European directives designed to help
people at work, though current discussions on the directive designed to stop abuse of fixed
term contracts suggest otherwise.
'Today's move will help the campaign for more family friendly policies in the UK. In
particular we hope this will lead to a right for new mothers to return to work part time
to be included in Labour's manifesto for the election.
'There also needs to be further progress on parental leave. Unpaid parental leave that
can only be taken in blocks of a week with an effective veto by the employer is not
flexible enough for most parents.'
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