Last week, Gingerbread responded to the Parental Leave and Pay Review’s call for evidence. We called on the government to make sure changes to the system support single-parent families.

What is the Parental Leave and Pay Review?

The Parental Leave and Pay Review was launched by the government in July 2025. It aims to change how parental leave and pay work to better support working families and help children get the best start in life. The review is running for 18 months, and government will continue to ask for views on what needs to change.

What’s Gingerbread’s view?

Gingerbread welcomes the review. It has the potential to significantly improve the parental leave and pay system for many families across the country and to create a fairer system for single parents.

We are particularly pleased that the government has identified single parents as one of the groups that they want to look at as they make any changes. We want to make sure that single parents are better supported by parental leave and pay policies. We also want to make sure any changes that are made, don’t disadvantage single parent households, particularly those who are not co-parenting and where there is no other parent around.

In the current system, there are disparities in entitlements that disadvantage single-parent families. Couple-parent families can access up to 41 weeks of paid parental leave through Statutory Maternity and Paternity Pay. In contrast, single-parent families, where no second parent is present, are limited to just one form of paid leave.

Additionally, the Shared Parental Leave and Shared Parental Pay offer, which allows parents to share up to 50 weeks of maternity or adoption leave and up to 37 weeks of pay between them, excludes single fathers or non-birthing parents where the other parent does not qualify for maternity or adoption leave.

We also note that this offer does not extend to family members or friends, meaning that single mothers/ birthing parents cannot allocate leave to a member of their support system, i.e., their child’s grandparent, leaving them with less flexibility in how their child is cared for compared to those in couple-parent families. In some other countries like Sweden, paid parental leave can be shared with other family members or friends.

Our submission  to the call for evidence urges the government to address these disparities within the system and to consider the needs of single parents more broadly. This also includes greater support for parents with a disabled child and for when returning to work from parental leave. We would also like to see single parents’ needs better reflected in unpaid parental leave policies.

What’s next?

The deadline for submissions to this call for evidence is now closed. Thank you to everyone who submitted a response. The government will now consider all responses, and the findings will be used to inform the next stage of the review.

The review will run for 18 months and there will be further opportunities to influence it throughout this time. It will end with a roadmap for possible reforms to the parental leave and pay system.

Gingerbread will continue to push for much needed changes to the system so that it reflects the needs of single-parent families.