Department for Business Innovation and Skills publishes draft rules on shared parental leave and pay

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (Bis) has recently published a set of draft regulations for shared parental leave and pay, whose final versions are scheduled to come into full force on the 1st of October 2014.

According to a media news report on this topic, the draft regulations outline a new set of entitlements for both parents or their partners to receive ‘statutory shared parental pay’ from their employers. The proposals detail the conditions that parents must meet to qualify for these payments and also allow flexibility for parents to change their requirements after their initial claim.

The regulations will allow both parents to share up to 50 weeks’ leave, which can be taken at the same time, or separately. Mothers will be allowed to reduce their maternity leave and, provided they give at least eight weeks’ notice, can make up to three requests to share their maternity leave with their partner after having their child.

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (Bis) has asked employers and other stakeholders to respond to the draft rules, saying they want to make the new system of shared parental leave and pay “as simple to use as possible”.

Naturally, implementing this new set of rules will not come easy for a significant number of HR departments, but going for a workforce management system that enables users to modify existing rules related to leave and pay in an easy and forward-looking manner could help, and this is specifically where Tensor plc could put its extensive experience in this field to very good use.

Our flagship WinTA.NET integrated workforce management solution incorporates a dedicated Absence Planning and Entitlement Management feature.

Our comprehensive, yet user-friendly software comes pre-loaded with graphical calendar charts that provide a colourful way of viewing an individual’s or a department’s absence records.

Each employee can be allocated different entitlements for absence, with specific rules set for every interval. As absence is booked and taken, the remainder available for each entitlement is updated. Entitlement formulae are used to calculate more complex entitlements calculated on a rising scale based upon length of service.

WinTA.NET supplies the relevant managers with information on employee’s absences through warning email notifications or via hardcopy reports. After that, the system would rapidly identify missing employees that are expected to be at work and then informs you via automatic email reporting reports distributed by email.

If you’d like to find out more about the Tensor workforce management solutions, just contact our team or Book a Demo, we’ll be more than happy to answer all of your questions and queries.