It was announced last week, that the Government plan to extend the new ‘Shared Parental Leave’ Rights, to grandparents.
This is trying to combat issues that have been brought to light with the new regulations that single parents have no-one to share leave with. Further it is to try and keep grandparents in work, rather than them giving up work to give child care to their grandchildren.
It is claimed that currently 2 million grandparents give up work or reduce their hours so as to assist in childcare. Grandparents can, at present make a flexible working request if they want to reduce their hours on a permanent basis when a grandchild in born, but don’t have the right to paid time off.
Whether the leave will be able to be shared between parents and grandparents is yet to be seen, but it maybe that multiple persons could take leave to look after a child, thus reducing the overall leave one person has to take, which may benefit employers in the long run, as they will have employees returning to work much sooner.
The government plan to commence consultation in 2016 with plans to implement in 2018, so a way off yet!
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