Ministers who are new parents should get more support

Being a minister is a unique job. And those who are expectant mothers face unique challenges – alongside the more familiar challenges new parents everywhere face, not least how to balance family responsibilities with the demands of their working life. As in wider society, arrangements for politicians who are mothers have improved over recent decades. When Baroness Hayman had a baby as an MP in the 1970s, she was reported to the parliamentary police for allowing her baby and babysitter into a Commons room reserved for MPs. 

This, of course, would not happen now, but ministers approaching motherhood have many things to juggle, as our new report – co-authored by former minister Chloe Smith, who both had children while in office and has provided maternity cover for a minister – shows. 

Governments have made positive changes in recent years 

The structures and processes to support ministers to take maternity leave have not always been sufficient, leaving individuals (and the teams around them) to work out how to manage it as they went along. Many of the former ministers we spoke to still reported a broadly positive experience, citing supportive ministerial colleagues, private office teams and special advisers. Suella Braverman described feeling “instantly reassured” by the supportive response of then prime minister Boris Johnson when she told him that she was pregnant months after being appointed attorney general; before her, Jo Swinson found the reaction of her fellow ministers in the coalition government to her pregnancy to be “much more positive and lovely than I had necessarily anticipated”.

However, arranging cover was often not straightforward, and those covering a period of maternity leave usually ended up doing so alongside another ministerial job – resulting in a colossal workload. Indeed, Jenny Willott told us that she returned from maternity leave to her job as a government whip in 2013 slightly earlier than she might have preferred because she “was worried that no one was covering my role fully and Mark [Harper, her cover] was really struggling with the extra work.” 

There have been improvements in recent decades – most significantly with the Ministerial and Other Maternity Allowances Act 2021, which made it much easier to appoint paid maternity cover for ministers. Then in 2023, Chloe Smith provided the first maternity cover for a secretary of state, helping show that it could be done even at the most senior levels. And there have also been welcome shifts in attitudes towards young parents in parliament more broadly – Baroness Hayman’s experience feels very much a thing of the past. 

But there is still room for improvement, and ways to make the 2021 Act more flexible and inclusive so that ministers can make choices that are best for them and their families. 

How to improve Ministerial and Other Maternity Allowances Act

Although the 2021 Act has been used several times since it was developed in response to Braverman’s pregnancy, its scope is fairly narrow. It does not for instance apply to expectant or new parents who are not themselves pregnant, and there is no provision allowing ministers to dock into shared parental leave with their partners. The prime minister should consider amending the legislation to broaden its applicability. And now it has been shown to work well, there is also potential for this legislation to be used for cases other than parental leave (sick leave, for example).

Not all reform requires legislation

As well as the formal arrangements outlined in legislation, the informal support that ministers receive can also be improved. Several ministers told us that they had documented their experience of taking maternity leave to support those who came after them but that these papers were lost and the recommendations never made it to the next minister. The IfG has frequently talked about the importance of improving institutional memory in the civil service – this should be applied to ministers’ experiences of maternity leave, too.

Beyond sharing ministers’ reflections with those who want to take leave in the future, the Cabinet Office should provide standardised guidance for ministers and private office teams so that they know what is available to them. Some of our interviewees told us that they struggled to get clear information about what was possible. This is understandable – many private offices will never see a minister who wants to take maternity leave – but this makes it more, not less, important that the centre of government explains what support is available.

There are, of course, many other things the government is focusing on in its first few months; and with an ambitious legislative agenda for the first session of this parliament, changing the rules around maternity leave for ministers may not be a priority. But while some of these changes are big and require parliamentary time, some are relatively straightforward and simply require dedicated leadership from senior ministers and officials. These should be enacted.

When he entered No.10, Keir Starmer promised a government of service. With these changes, he can make it easier for his government to serve.