Five UK retailers — M&S, Tesco, Asda, Waitrose, and Lidl — have collectively upgraded parental leave for nearly 650,000 workers, tripling or quadrupling the statutory two-week minimum. M&S and Tesco now offer six weeks at full pay, placing them among the most generous FTSE 100 employers. The private sector is doing what Parliament has not managed in two decades. The numbers expose the gap starkly. Statutory paternity pay is £194.32 per week — less than half the national living wage. The UK ranks 40th out of 43 OECD countries on paternity leave generosity. Over two decades after paternity leave rights were introduced, Britain now holds the least generous entitlement in Europe. Fathers who are self-employed, including much of the construction and agricultural workforce, get nothing at all. Sectoral divergence is the real story. Construction employs roughly one in ten working men but accounts for only one in fifteen recipients of statutory paternity pay. JCB only recently moved from three days to two weeks. Rolls-Royce, with a workforce more than 80% male, offers the bare statutory minimum. The industries with the most fathers are the ones doing the least. More than 100 Labour MPs have written to Andy Burnham urging improvements in the upcoming budget: six weeks at 90% of earnings, capped at £1,200 per week, extended to the self-employed. An 18-month government review of parental leave is expected to report later this year. Whether that review produces legislation or just a report remains the central question. Retailers and the Usdaw union held a parliamentary roundtable hosted by Labour MP Connor Rand to push the case. Rand, a former Usdaw researcher and new father himself, framed it bluntly: too many fathers cannot bond with their children or support their partners because the statutory offer is inadequate. The political framing is shifting from a nice-to-have benefit to an infrastructure gap. The private-sector leaders — Ikea, Lego, Virgin Media O2 alongside the grocery giants — are demonstrating that enhanced leave is commercially viable for large employers. The question is whether government policy catches up or whether paternity leave remains a perk of working for the right company rather than a right attached to fatherhood itself. Campaign groups The Dad Shift and Inspiring Dads compiled the data driving this push. Their analysis makes visible what statutory reporting obscures: the gap between headline policy and who actually takes leave, and in which sectors. If the government review lands without binding legislation, this disparity will only widen.
