Maternity Action is a maternity rights charity dedicated to promoting, protecting and enhancing the rights of all pregnant women, new mothers and their families to employment, social security and healthcare. We deliver free, specialist advice through our telephone helplines, and maintain comprehensive, up-to-date online information.
Our Maternity Rights Advice Service delivers two helplines – one covering London, the other national – providing expert legal advice on employment rights and social security entitlements, and our Migrant Women's Rights Service provides legal advice and training to midwives and voluntary sector workers supporting vulnerable pregnant migrants to access housing, welfare and healthcare entitlements.
All our services are delivered by in-house employment and immigration lawyers. They support women and families to increase self-advocacy to resolve challenges with employment and benefits, as well as support vulnerable migrant women and families to improve access to health services.
Demand is growing
The need for these services has grown since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Poor treatment of pregnant women at work is widespread: 77% experience some form of negative or potentially discriminatory experience, with 11% – some 55 000 per year – losing their jobs, and 40% report negative impacts on health as a result of poor treatment. We are the only specialist maternity rights service in the UK, and there is significant unmet demand, with only one in seven callers answered in 2019. Similarly, there is no other advice organisation covering housing, welfare and healthcare for vulnerable migrant women.
Our impact and evaluation work demonstrates that the Maternity Rights Advice Service helps women retain their jobs, resolve problems at work, access maternity pay and benefits, and reduce stress. An evaluation of the Migrant Women's Rights Service demonstrates that midwives are better able to support vulnerable migrant and refugee women to access housing and income.
Guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence for maternity services recommends that working women are informed of their maternity rights and benefits. Despite this, Maternity Action has found no health service which trains midwives on maternity rights and benefits.
The delivery of our advice services in partnership with maternity services would therefore benefit midwives through providing a direct referral route to specialist information and support with a range of non-clinical issues, including issues that pregnant women may raise either directly or indirectly with their midwife. In a sample of 90 callers to our advice service, 30% said they had spoken to a health professional about the issue they were contacting Maternity Action about, most commonly a midwife. So we are currently developing a model for health justice partnerships-collaborations that embed legal help in healthcare services and teams.
Influencing government and policy makers
As part of our research, policy and influencing work, Maternity Action convenes the Alliance for Maternity Rights, a campaigning coalition consisting of parenting groups, trade unions and health professional organisations, including the Fawcett Society, Gingerbread, NCT, Pregnant Then Screwed, the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), the TUC, the Women's Budget Group and Working Families. In April 2021, the Alliance drew up and published an eight-point action plan for ministers to work to end pregnancy and maternity discrimination in the workplace. This calls for urgent ministerial action to improve redundancy protections for pregnant women and new mothers, increase statutory maternity and parental pay, enable more equal parenting by scrapping and replacing the chronically failing Shared Parental Leave scheme, and strengthen gender pay gap reporting.
Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, Maternity Action sought to influence the government's new support schemes, so that they would better protect pregnant women and new mothers. We urged ministers to end the unequal treatment of Statutory Maternity Pay and Maternity Allowance in the calculation of Universal Credit awards, which can leave low-income women on Maternity Allowance as much as £5 000 worse off. And we gave evidence to an inquiry by the Petitions Committee of MPs on the impact of COVID-19 on pregnant women and new parents, and to another by the Women and Equalities Committee on the gendered impact of the pandemic.
After ministers repeatedly failed to act on our calls for COVID-19-specific guidance for employers on how to treat pregnant women in their workforce, Maternity Action joined with the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the RCM to urge the Chancellor to amend the furlough scheme to enable employers to recover the cost of a maternity suspension on full pay of a woman in her third trimester.
As the COVID-19 support schemes come to an end, and women face a wave of potentially unprecedented job losses, Maternity Action continues to call on ministers to act to strengthen legal protections against unfair redundancy, and to protect access to justice through the Employment Tribunal system.