Does Kemi Badenoch really think it’s a good idea turning back the clock on maternity pay? - Jayne Dowle
Kemi Badenoch has some questionable views about how modern families work, especially as the majority do find themselves relying on two incomes to pay the bills.
Speaking to interviewer Kate McCann on Times Radio last Sunday, Badenoch, when questioned if she thought maternity pay was excessive, replied: “I think it’s gone too far the other way in terms of general business regulation, we need to allow businesses, especially small businesses, to make more of their own decisions.”
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Hide AdFor employed women, the first six weeks – that’s weeks, not months - maternity pay is paid at 90 per cent of normal earnings. For the next 33 weeks, if a woman chooses to take further time off – and can afford to do so - she is paid at the same 90 per cent of normal earnings or the flat rate of £184.03 a month, whichever is lower.


Self-employed women may be entitled to the same sum, depending on how long they have been registered as working for themselves and the level of their Class 2 National Insurance contributions.
Every working woman in England, Wales and Scotland who has had a baby in the last few decades knows to her cost that British maternity pay is one of the lowest in Europe. For a mother of three children, who presumably would want mothers to support her in power, maternity pay was an odd target for Badenoch to choose.
She only needs to ask anyone in the Treasury – Badenoch was Secretary of State for Business and Trade under Rishi Sunak – and they will tell her that to keep the economy afloat and taxes paid we need more babies to be born.
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Hide AdThe last thing politicians should be doing is propagating the downward trend. According to the Office for National Statistics the birth rate across England and Wales fell from 1.55 children per woman in 2021 to 1.49 in 2022. To maintain our population, the replacement rate, known as the R-rate, needs to be at least 2.1 children per woman.
Then came Badenoch’s corker: “The exact amount of maternity pay in my view is neither here nor there… We need to have more personal responsibility - there was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies.”
There was also a time when women didn’t have the vote or access to contraception, died regularly in childbirth or from exhaustion after bearing a multitudinous brood and were denied the right to earn their own living in many professions – including teaching – when they got married.
Or forced by societal pressure to give up lucrative careers when they gave birth.
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Hide AdI know several women of my mother’s generation who had to step back from the law or academia, because in the late 1960s and 1970s – despite advances made by the feminist movement – it simply wasn’t the ‘done thing’ for clever mothers to work.
Does this potential leader of His Majesty’s Opposition really want to turn back the clock to those days? Because interestingly, as a woman, she has benefited hugely from enjoying the rights to study and work, graduating from the University of Sussex with a Masters in Engineering in 2003, before doing a law degree in London, then going on to enjoy a career in IT, banking and the media, alongside her political activities.
Badenoch, wife of a banker, daughter of a GP and a professor of physiology, is known for speaking plainly. Her ‘brand’ has become one that voices the things others think but dare not say. But she comes from a place of privilege, however much she likes to play it down.
Quite recently she was also in the news for claiming that a stint working in fast-food restaurant McDonalds as a teenager qualified her as “working class”. Less well-reported, but equally worrying, are her views on the minimum wage (currently £11.44 per hour for workers aged 21 and above) as also being burdensome to businesses.
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Hide AdSpeaking plainly is one thing, sabotaging your own chances of high office by opening your mouth before fully engaging your brain is quite another. Badenoch’s lead over closest rival, Robert Jenrick, has indeed been damaged by her maternity pay views.
A Sky News poll of 802 Tory members conducted over nine days to Sunday night, showed that they would now choose Badenoch by 52 per cent to Mr Jenrick's 48 per cent, a narrowing four-point advantage.
Rather than hit out at working mothers – and those with the temerity to expect just over a tenner an hour for their labour – perhaps Badenoch would do better to come up with some ideas which support businesses to survive, grow and prosper.
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