Statutory Neonatal Care Leave and Pay Guidance
On 05 April 2025, a Press Release issued by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) hailed the new employment right to neonatal care leave which may be paid.
It is all well and good to have this announcement, but where is the guidance that employers need to put this into place?
As a representative of the British Computer Society on the above group, it is disappointing HMRC have not engaged at all since January 2024, or published updated minutes since 13 October 2022. At the 2024 meeting, my notes indicate:
‘This is via a Private Member’s Bill that has been supported by the UK Government. It will apply in Great Britain only. Royal Assent is expected in May 2023 to be effective April 2025.’
That was the last time that any update was given on Statutory Neonatal Care Leave and Pay, which does give industry the impression that members of this ‘HM Revenue and Customs-sponsored forum’ (which promises to ‘discuss and consult with key stakeholders on statutory payment issues’) is responsible for the publication of this late guidance.
This is absolutely not the case and representatives have been trying to engage with HMRC; however, this is not reciprocal.
On 04 April 2025, this was updated, starting at page 16700 (i.e. SPM167000). This has the following sections:
Unsurprisingly, the Statutory Payments Manual focuses on payment rather than the leave entitlement. It is worth looking at SPM171100 in detail to consider the calculation of the AWE in SNCP cases. This is not straightforward for both employers and software developers:
SPM167800 mentions that if an employee is not entitled to Statutory Neonatal Care Pay (SNCP) the employer should issue form SNCP1. I’m not quite sure where this is as it is not in the ‘Statutory pay forms’ collection – mind you, this advises the form is called the NE01.
Note that the above page does not detail the SPBP1 (the form to be given to an employee if they do not qualify for Statutory Parental Bereavement Pay.
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On 06 April 2025, HMRC and the Department for Business and Trade published the following guidance. All far too late for employers to be able to implement this new statutory entitlement and develop occupational policies that interact with other ones such as maternity and paternity.
We are where we are I suppose and here are links to the guidance that was published:
Note that ‘Employee rights when taking maternity and other types of parental leave’ has not been updated (yet).
The following forms have been made available which may help employers:
HMRC’s advice on tax-free Employer Supported Childcare in the 480 has been updated to include reference to this new statutory payment. Essentially, as with all other statutory payments, this says that the value Average Weekly Earnings and, therefore, entitlement, may be affected if the employee is in a salary exchange / sacrifice scheme.
On 02 April 2025, Acas announced that it had produced guidance. Perhaps, the best way of looking at this good guidance is to go to their website and search ‘neonatal’. This produces 34 guidance pages including:
Don’t forget that both SNCL and SNCP interact with other child-related statutory entitlements, for example maternity and paternity. Hence the Acas search which yields 34 pages and do contain the necessary interactions.