Lord Jones of Penybont (Lab)

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 100. I was born in 1967. My mother received a less than generous 12 weeks of paid maternity leave. I was born with a condition that required me to have physiotherapy twice a day every day for the first two years of my life. To save me having to go to the hospital every single day, my father volunteered to be trained in that physiotherapy, and he was not entitled to time off to do that. He did it anyway and he is the reason why I am able to stand straight in this Chamber today. Paternity leave would have been thought of as some kind of dangerous idea in those days, no doubt. When our children arrived at the beginning of this century, my wife got extended leave—paid leave of course. I was a young and ambitious Minister at the time, keen to please my then boss, the First Minister, so I took no leave at all. Even then, there was no talk of paternity leave; you were expected to get on with it. I missed out on the early months of my children’s life in our family—something they, as teenagers, often reminded me of, usually asking for money at the same time. I cannot support the amendment because it is too prescriptive, in my view, but it seeks to address important issues. I ask my noble friend the Minister to consider these three questions in her response. I very much welcome the review the Government have announced, and we know that its timescale will be some 18 months. When is the review due to start? Will any documentation be published beforehand so we are able to see the remit and terms of reference of that review? Will those documents be laid before Parliament? We are a long way behind the European norm when it comes to paternity leave. We owe it to so many families up and down the length and breadth of this land to continue to address this issue, and I look forward to the response from my noble friend the Minister.