The new Work and Families Act 2006 will come into force in April 2007 with significant changes to maternity, paternity and adoption leave and pay, as well as an extension of the right to request flexible working advises employment law specialist Neil Andrews of Dorset law firm Coles Miller.

MATERNITY LEAVE AND PAY
• All women will have the right to both six months' ordinary maternity leave and six months' additional maternity leave (i.e. 12 months in total) regardless of their length of service.
• Those returning early from maternity leave will have to give eight weeks' notice rather than the current 28 days' notice.
• Employers will be able to make "reasonable" contact with employees at any stage during their maternity leave – the right to do this has previously been in doubt.
• "Keeping in touch days" will be introduced as an option to enable women to work for a limited number of days during the period that they receive statutory maternity pay (SMP) without losing their entitlement to SMP for that week or triggering the end of their maternity leave. This is primarily to encourage more effective communication between employers and employees during leave and to ease employees' return to work.
• The period in which SMP is payable will increase from six to nine months. The Government proposes to extend this period to twelve months' paid leave by the end of the current Parliament and estimates that approximately 400,000 mothers a year will benefit from the changes. A proportion of SMP will still be recoverable from the Government.

The Government is to continue to consider whether the responsibility for paying SMP (amongst other statutory payments) should be transferred from employers to HM Revenue & Customs.

PATERNITY LEAVE AND PAY
• In addition to the current entitlement to two weeks' paid paternity leave, fathers will be entitled to up to six months' additional paternity leave if the mother chooses to return to work early.
• Additional paternity leave will be unpaid unless the mother returns to work before exhausting her full entitlement to SMP – in other words, before the end of what will be a nine month period. In those circumstances, the father will receive statutory paternity pay ("SPP") for the remaining period that the mother would have received SMP. It appears that the mother must take six months' leave in order for the father to benefit from these payment provisions, so the right to receive any SPP will not apply unless the mother is on leave for at least six months.

However, in terms of the detail many questions remain unanswered and it is unclear in particular how the new right to additional paternity leave and pay will be administered on a day-to-day basis. The Government has recently consulted on this and we await publication of the responses to that consultation.

FLEXIBLE WORKING RIGHTS FOR CARERS
From April 2007, the right to request flexible working will be extended to those who care for adults (for example, those who are elderly or sick). We await the Government's final proposal on which "carers" should be covered by this extension. However, it is estimated that up to 1.5 million carers could benefit.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
“Although additional paternity leave will be a new right for fathers, the take up from them is likely to be low given that this leave will more often than not be unpaid”.

“Employers should keep any company maternity and paternity pay policies under review. They should also consider whether HR teams, managers and payroll staff will require training on the new family friendly rights prior to them coming into force in April 2007” conclude Mr Andrews.