I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to extend entitlements to parental leave for parents of babies born prematurely or requiring neonatal care; and for connected purposes.
As well as being the MP for Glasgow East, and above all else, I am Isaac and Jessica’s dad. Both Isaac and Jessica were born prematurely and spent the early weeks of their lives in neonatal care so, from the outset, I declare a deeply personal interest in the issue that I am seeking to legislate on today.
My wife and I understood that having children at all might be difficult, but in February 2015, we learned, to our immense joy, that we were expecting our first child. Owing to a pre-existing medical condition, Roslyn was told that hers would be a complex, high-risk pregnancy with a higher chance of ending in stillbirth.
In the early hours of 26 June 2015, our son Isaac was born prematurely at the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow. During an aborted labour that evolved into an emergency caesarean section, Isaac’s heart rate plummeted. His blood sugars were incredibly low and he could not breathe without assistance. Within a few moments of being born, he was whisked away from Roslyn and me and transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit, where he spent the earliest part of his life in an incubator, hooked up to countless machines and wires. In that unit, over a period, Isaac received amazing love, care and support from our national health service, which stabilised his breathing, allowed his heart rate to recover and built up his blood sugars. It would be days before we could even hold him. Our only contact with him was holding his tiny hands through holes in the incubator.
Three years later, just last September, we went through all that again for the birth of Jessica. Jessica’s hospital stay was even longer, due to protracted breathing difficulties that culminated in her spending the first eight months of her life on oxygen. I still vividly remember watching her turning blue and having to be resuscitated by nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit.
I say all this because sadly this is the norm—the reality—for many parents across the United Kingdom. Each year, around 100,000 babies are born premature or sick and have an extended stay in neonatal care. I speak for every family on the neonatal unit when I say a heartfelt thank you to NHS staff for supporting our children, and us as families, through an incredibly distressing, uncertain and vulnerable time.
That stress, uncertainty and vulnerability show that current legislation is simply not fit for purpose. UK employment legislation takes no account of the fact that some babies will spend much longer in hospital after being born, especially if they are born premature or sick. As a result, parents, particularly dads, require extra paid parental leave beyond that covered under current arrangements. My statutory paternity leave had run out by the time Isaac and Jessica were discharged from the neonatal unit. Sadly, that is the case for so many parents who face the brutal decision to return to work while their child is still in hospital. Research by the charity Bliss found that two thirds of dads had to return to work while their baby was still receiving specialist neonatal care.