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Work and Families Bill

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. This Government back Britain’s families and back Britain’s businesses. Those aims are not mutually exclusive, but mutually supportive. Flexible working raises employment levels for our economy, widens the talent pool for business and improves people’s standards of living. It enables parents and other carers not only to stay in work, but to advance at work as well. It seeks to ensure that every child gets the best possible start in life. The Bill has four main parts. It will extend paid maternity and adoption leave, extend the successful right to request flexible working to carers of adults, help fathers to play more of a role in their child’s upbringing if the mother returns to work, and make it easier for employers to manage the administration of those rights. The Bill is about fairness, social justice and genuine choice. It is a necessary response to unprecedented change within our society, to unprecedented change within our economy, with the growth of Asia, to advances in technology, and to huge shifts in demographics. It is also a response to unprecedented change in our homes. The old formula dictated that all mothers gave up work completely on childbirth, while fathers sometimes had to work longer hours to make up for the loss of income, particularly if the mother was the higher earner. Increasingly, fathers want to play a more active role in child care, beyond the first few weeks of the baby’s life, and more and more mothers want to return to the workplace after having a child, often because of a financial imperative, but also because they see work as an important part of a fulfilled life. Around half of all mothers now return to work after having a child compared with a quarter a generation ago. Men now take on a third of all child care. So the birth of a child need not be the end of the mother’s career. Mothers should not be forced out of the work force when they would rather stay on, and businesses should not be deprived of highly skilled, highly trained, highly capable staff when they want to retain them.