Did Kemi Badenoch really call maternity pay ‘excessive’?

Did Kemi Badenoch just say that maternity pay in the UK is ‘excessive’? That’s the claim kicking off the first day of the Tory party conference: an affair that is supposed to act as a ‘beauty pageant’ for the four remaining leadership contenders. It’s not great timing for Badenoch – and it’s certainly not how she and her team will have wanted to kickstart her four days in Birmingham, trying to win over grassroot Conservatives. It’s also, however, not really what she said.

Speaking to Times Radio’s Kate McCann at conference this afternoon, the pair got into a discussion about business regulation. You can watch the exchange above, but the crux of the debate is here:

McCann: ‘We have one of the lowest rates in the OECD of maternity pay in this country. Changing that would probably help people make better decisions around family. Do you think we’ve got the right level of maternity pay at the moment?’

Badenoch: ‘Maternity pay varies depending on who you work for….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 the burden of regulation is too high.’

McCann: ‘So maternity pay is excessive?’ 

Badenoch: ‘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. 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 individual decisions.’ 

It was certainly a messy exchange. McCann clearly wanted Badenoch to speak to maternity pay specifically, while the leadership hopeful wanted to make a point about the costs placed on businesses and taxpayers more widely. Badenoch tweeted soon after the media noting that her comments were about all the red tape wrapped about business, not about maternity leave. 

It’s always a tricky game to try to answer the question you want, rather than the one you were asked. A clearer answer from Badenoch about maternity pay specifically could have quickly dispelled the accusation that she has a problem with statutory pay. But what’s clear from the full clip is that Badenoch was trying to make a rather crucial point about how her Conservative colleagues respond to calls for more spending nowadays – a point that risks getting overlooked due to the flurry around the maternity muddle.

On the topic of birth rates and family planning, McCann asked Badenoch: ‘Do you think that the government could or should do more to help people build a family?’

Badenoch answered:

One of the problems we have right now is that there is too much of government getting involved in everything. People aren’t happy at the moment with what government does. Asking the government to do more is not the answer. This is one of the principles I’m fighting this leadership contest on. 

There is too much government. Every time there is an issue or someone has a question, the answer cannot be “well let’s have the government help people to have babies, or let the government create a football regulation, or let the government come in and ban smoking in gardens.” It’s just excessive. Government is not good at doing this stuff.

All the leadership contenders have been talking about having the ‘hard conversations’ in this race. Perhaps this is the first one. It’s not difficult to promise all the things voters want to hear. It is incredibly difficult, however, to talk about how those promises have been vastly overstated, and what the state can realistically do – and do well.

This was an inevitable dilemma after the pandemic: how to reset expectations after spending billions of pounds to pay people’s wages and cap energy bills? Maternity pay is, in fact, a very good example of this. Britain is actually at two extremes of maternity pay within the OECD: while the pay overall is towards the bottom of the pack, the length for which women have the legal right to take time off of work is at the top. Does this need rebalancing? If so, where might the cash come from? 

Today, Badenoch said the dangerous, yet critical, bit out loud: if you want to put more cash behind a policy or project, it has to come from somewhere. If you won’t say where, that means the tax burden is inevitably going to keep rising – as it has done under the Tories for the last five years. It shouldn't be a scandal for saying so.