Glasgow Business . 43
www.glasgowchamberofcommerce.com
THE RIGHT ADVICE T
New ‘family-friendly’ laws give employees flexibility but pose business challenges
he raſt of recent family-friendly employment policies that have been enacted since April have provided employees with more flexibility to
spend time with their families ... but have also provided new challenges for smaller companies to resource their skills gaps while their people take breaks. Te new legislation is adding to the
complexity of managing employee law in Scotland, and this is being compounded by recent judgments from the European Court of Justice that have muddied the waters around holiday pay and other issues. Glasgow Business looks at some of the
recent changes in employment law that businesses should be aware of.
SHARED PARENTAL LEAVE
Tis was introduced to give greater flexibility to parents to share the care of a child in their first
year, and is available to people with a baby due, or children placed for adoption, on or aſter 5 April 2015. Te legislation allows the mother to take the
first two weeks’ compulsory leave and the remaining 50 weeks can then be shared between mother and partner, either concurrently or consecutively, or they can take short periods of time off work and go back to work alternately. While this makes it more logistically
challenging for employers to accommodate this flexible leave, Donald MacKinnon, Director of Legal Services at Law at Work, is not sure this will become the issue it could be. He explained: “I suspect that Shared
Parental Leave is going to be an issue in theory rather than in practice. “When the Government changed the
original 52-week maternity leave for the mother to Additional Paternity Leave – where the mother took the first 26 weeks as maternity
leave and allowed the second 26 weeks to be shared with the other partner – there was very low take-up. Government statistics showed that under three per cent of eligible partners took up this option. “It’s a nice idea for the parents to take the
leave concurrently but if you are only geting paid the current statutory maternity pay then it’s questionable how two professional parents could survive on this if they split it 25 weeks each. “I understand that the Government’s own
statistics suggest that perhaps six per cent of eligible people could take this up, but so far we have come across very few clients requesting assistance with this issue. “However, it’s important that companies are
aware of this change and update their policies to reflect it.”
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