Have Badenoch’s remarks about maternity pay blown her Tory leadership chances?

Thus far, it is fair to say that it’s Kemi Badenoch, for good or ill, who’s become the centre of attention at the Conservative Party conference. With Rishi Sunak absent and the conference acting as a beauty parade for the four remaining candidates, Badenoch has been by far the most high-profile and controversial figure. She enjoys the “direct” approach to political communication, which can come across as arrogant (or, alternatively, just is arrogance), and some of her comments on maternity rights have caused a certain amount of consternation...

No, not precisely, though the sentiments she’s expressed carry the heavy implication that, in practical terms, maternity rights (and their cost to small businesses in particular) are, as she put it, “excessive”. She was speaking to Times Radio about business regulation (as a former business and trade secretary), and it’s worth quoting her in full, because she was a little inconsistent, or at least unclear:

“Maternity pay varies, depending on who you work for. But statutory maternity pay is a function of tax. Tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This, in my view, is excessive ... Businesses are closing, businesses are not starting in the UK, because they say that the burden of regulation is too high.”

Asked if she thought maternity pay was excessive, Badenoch 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 those decisions. The exact amount of maternity pay, in my view, is neither here nor there. We need to make sure that we are creating an environment where people can work, and people can have more freedom to make their own decisions.”

Badenoch also believes, consonant with her belief in a smaller state and individual responsibility, that “the answer cannot be to let the government help people to have babies”. That does tend to point to lower maternity pay, or eligibility, or both, to be fair.

It seems not, and she clarified that later; but you can’t help feeling that under a Badenoch administration, the maternity pay and rights regime would be less generous than it is now, especially for those working for small and medium enterprises.

In legal terms, employees can take up to 52 weeks’ maternity leave. The first 26 weeks are known as “ordinary maternity leave”, the last 26 weeks as “additional maternity leave”. Statutory maternity pay is set at the following levels: the first 6 weeks: 90 per cent of the woman’s average weekly earnings (AWE) before tax; the remaining 33 weeks: £184.03 or 90 per cent of their AWE (whichever is lower).

Obviously, employers can pay their staff whatever they want, including full pay for extended periods (as well as keeping them in touch with the workplace and offering flexibility in any arrangements). The cost to the state of a maternity benefit arises when an employer claims back the permitted amounts of statutory pay for the prescribed period. This amounts to 92 per cent of employees’ statutory maternity pay (or statutory paternity, statutory adoption, statutory parental bereavement or statutory shared parental pay). For a very small business, 103 per cent may be claimed back from the DWP.

In total, statutory maternity pay costs the Treasury about £2.8bn a year, but of course, businesses who choose to hire temporary workers, or use overtime to cover for someone away on maternity or paternity leave, will face higher wage costs.

When she worked at The Spectator she voluntarily gave up her job to save the company money during her second pregnancy; as an MP, she took full advantage of fully paid leave for her third baby. She did, in 2019, say that “Even now though, most women – often in minimum-wage jobs, the self-employed or single mums – must balance work and family life. These women need the support of people like me, whose circumstances give us greater control and choice in our lives ... Statutory maternity pay is £148 a week, while an MP receives full pay even when we take maternity leave. I can’t speak for my parliamentary colleagues, but I would find it hard to claim, to a constituent on the minimum wage, that I have a bad deal.”

Superficially, yes. Labour seized on her remarks, and her principal leadership rival, Robert Jenrick, said: “I don’t agree with Kemi on this one. I am a father of three young daughters. I want to see them get the support that they need when they enter the workplace.”

There is also an embryonic natalist movement in the Tory party, which would like to replace immigration with “British babies”. A fringe session at the conference reportedly included a slightly uncomfortable/bizarre discussion on how to persuade women to “breed for Britain” in order to “grow more” social care workers, one day after Badenoch’s comments about “excessive” maternity pay. It echoes the Trumpian scorn for childless people that is heard in the US.

On the other hand, many Tory members, especially those involved in business, may quietly sympathise with Badenoch’s ideas.

She leads the field among the party membership – but that’s only going to help her provided she gets to be one of the final pair of names on the ballot paper. The danger, for her, is that her MP colleagues doubt her wider appeal to the electorate, and she fails to gather enough MPs’ votes to make it.

Certainly her ruminations on “culture” and paying for NHS services suggest that she is not, as she recently claimed, someone who never gaffes because she chooses her words so carefully. If the membership finds that it is not allowed to vote for her, there will be a huge backlash, which would leave her in an invidious, but also quite powerful, position.