More than 160 parents will miss out on vital neonatal leave and pay every day until 2025– will your MP take a stand?

Neonatal leave and pay have just become law and will mean employed parents can have up to 12 weeks extra leave from work if their baby is born premature or unwell. However, the first parents won’t be able to claim until April 2025.

We don’t think this is good enough.

Over the next two years, almost 120,000 parents of babies needing neonatal care in the UK will miss out. This will have long-lasting financial and emotional consequences on families across the UK.

We need your help now to bring the implementation of the Act forward ...

Neonatal leave and pay have just become law and will mean employed parents can have up to 12 weeks extra leave from work if their baby is born premature or unwell. However, the first parents won’t be able to claim until April 2025.

We don’t think this is good enough.

Over the next two years, almost 120,000 parents of babies needing neonatal care in the UK will miss out. This will have long-lasting financial and emotional consequences on families across the UK.

We need your help now to bring the implementation of the Act forward.

“I felt as though I missed out on the opportunities to be there and to be a part of any key decisions that had to be made immediately as part of Joseph’s care. Financially, even if my employer had offered it, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to take time off work unpaid.” Tom, dad to Joseph, born 15 weeks early in 2018.

Write to your MP now and ask them to support the campaign to bring forward the implementation of neonatal leave and pay.

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Time is running out to make neonatal leave and pay a reality for the thousands of families who desperately need it over the next two years. Use the tool below to write to your MP to ask them to pledge their support.

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Subject:

The Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Bill received cross-party support to reach Royal Assent on the 24th of May 2023, with implementation scheduled for April 2025. However, now is the time to bring forward this new entitlement, to stop almost 120,000 parents missing out on being involved in decisions about their baby’s care over the next two years.

More than 90,000 premature and sick babies receive neonatal care in the UK every year. For their parents, the experience can be traumatic and life-changing when instead of taking their baby home shortly after birth, their baby is admitted to a specialist hospital unit.

The Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Act will provide additional leave and pay for employees with responsibility for children receiving neonatal care. This new law entitles both parents up to 12 weeks extra leave and pay to spend vital time with their babies if they are born premature or sick without the worry of returning to work, if they meet the qualifying criteria.

How long a baby will stay in neonatal care can vary from days to weeks or months. Until now, there has been no flexibility in the current parental leave policies, many parents must return to work while their baby is still in the hospital. Yet, the Government expects it will take at least 18 months to implement the policy with the first parents expected to be able to claim in April 2025. By using the Government’s own estimates, this will mean around 120,000 parents will miss out on this vital support.

For babies to have the very best outcomes, their parents must be supported to be partners in care delivery and decision-making. This is best for babies, and for families, but it requires both parents to attend the neonatal unit for long, uninterrupted periods of time. Additionally, Research from Bliss (the charity for premature and sick babies) shows that there are other consequences for families if they are unable to take paid leave from work during this time:

- 1 in 4 parents had to borrow money or increase their debt because of their baby’s neonatal stay. For example, a parent shared in a Bliss survey 
“The cost of my partner losing money by having to extend his time off and having unpaid leave, combined with the frequent trips to visit and drop off breastmilk I'd expressed (we had to travel almost 2 hours, daily). Petrol, buying ‘quick meals’ just so we'd get time to eat at all, the extortionate parking fees, paying for childcare for our eldest...it all piled up. We still did it, because we were terrified one missed trip could result in a phone call saying the worst, but it put us in debt.” This echoes Bliss’ cost-of-living crisis research which found that in 7 out of 10 families with a significant neonatal stay, at least one parent (usually dads and non-birthing parents) returns to work while their baby is still sick in hospital.

- 80% of parents report that their mental health worsened after their neonatal experience. For example:
1) Dads tell Bliss that they feel guilt about not being able to support their partners or babies when they returned home from the hospital. In Bliss’ 2019 survey, 36% of dad’s resort to being signed off sick to spend time with their baby on neonatal unit.  
2) Mums who have complications during pregnancy and were unwell in hospital at the same time as their baby, tell Bliss they struggle to feel a sense of normalcy with the loss of bonding time.

Throughout the pandemic, we saw how quickly Government can move to support employees when needed, and we want to urge you to consider the many thousands of parents currently returning to work while their baby is critically ill, who will miss out on the support they need because of this long implementation timeline.

As my MP, please support the campaign to bring forward the introduction of Neonatal Care Leave and Pay to relieve the huge emotional and financial stress from families with a baby born premature or sick in your constituency. You can do this by writing to the Financial Secretary; the Treasury; and Minister for Enterprise, Markets and Small Business to push for faster implementation of Neonatal Care Leave and Pay.

I look forward to hearing how you are planning to support this campaign. If you need any further information, please contact bmccleverty@bliss.org.uk.

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