Actors, performers and workers of the gig economy unite! An increasing number of Britons are living the precarious, job-to-job existence already familiar to performers.
In response to this widespread change to patterns of employment, Tracy Brabin, the actress-turned-Labour MP, is to introduce a bill on Wednesday to bring in shared parental pay for people living the kind of insecure working life she used to lead.
“It really feels like the days of introducing employment rights which only apply to those on secure contracts are stuck in the past and really should come to an end,” said Brabin this weekend.
The shadow education minister’s words have been supported by the Grammy-winning film composer David Arnold. “Self-employed people have children the same as those who are regularly employed, they have to bring them up the same way and have the same problem of sharing responsibility. It just seems odd and out-of-step for them to not have the same choices and rights that regularly employed people do,” he told the Observer.
Since 2015, shared parental leave legislation has enabled employed couples to split up to 52 weeks of their time off work after the birth of their child and 39 weeks of statutory pay. But the right does not extend to the self-employed.
For the former actress and screenwriter, best known for her role as Tricia Armstrong in Coronation Street, the issue is personal as she and her partner raised a family while both were freelancers in the creative industries. “Through my own experiences, I know that anything that would have made having young children easier would have made a massive difference,” Brabin said.
The policy is cost neutral, she argues, as new mothers will simply share their maternity allowance with their partner. Labour already plans to extend the rules to include the self-employed if it wins power, but Brabin’s suggested move has also received cross-party support, including from Conservatives Ed Vaizey, the former culture minister, and Maria Miller, chair of the women and equalities committee. The Liberal Democrat deputy leader, Jo Swinson, also supports the bill, which would open up shared parental pay to 44,000 people in flexible work.
It is not just creative workers who are disproportionately excluded from shared parental leave; those in sectors such engineering, education and physiotherapy are increasingly employed on a short-term basis.
Brabin argues it is this growing freelance sector that will most value the chance to share leave from work. While figures released this month showed that just 2% of eligible families had used Shared Parental Leave so far, a survey from Parental Pay Equality found that more than 70% of those families who depend upon a freelance income would use the scheme if it became available to them. As a result, Brabin’s call for legislation has been backed by the actors’ union Equity, UK Music, Raising Films and the campaign group Pregnant then Screwed.
“The support has come thick and fast, which is great and it really feels like there is an opportunity, with the Taylor Review and conversation about closing the gender pay gap, for the government to put their money where their mouth is,” said Brabin.
Gender equality is also central to Brabin’s bill. “All the impetus is on freelance mums to carry on in their careers, or take a risk and hope they’ll make more than maternity allowance while working. We need to put the family at the heart of policies,” she said. Screenwriter Hope Dickson Leach hopes Brabin’s drive to change the law will bring greater equality in the creative world. She argues that an industry so reliant on freelancers inevitably has “a longstanding problem with gender parity”.
“We need more women in the creative industries,” she said this weekend, “and one way to make that happen quickly is to help new mothers in establishing families with equal parenting roles. This is far less likely to happen if the mothers are required to stay at home with the babies, while their partners go back to work.”
