Is Hospitality Designed for Mothers?

This is the second piece in my maternity series and I wanted this one to be a little more factual, because it is very easy to say that hospitality needs to do better for mothers without really looking at what that would mean in practice.

I absolutely think the industry needs to do better, but some of the conversation can become a bit simplistic. Telling restaurants that they should offer six months full pay, perfect flexibility and better support sounds great, but if you actually run a small hospitality business you know that sometimes the structure simply is not there to support it.

So I wanted to look at what maternity actually looks like now, what other industries are able to offer, and why hospitality is so different.

In the UK, if you qualify for Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP), you can receive it for up to 39 weeks.

Qualifying is not automatic. You need to have been continuously employed by the same employer for at least 26 weeks by the end of the 15th week before your baby is due. You also need to be earning at least £129 a week on average, give your employer the correct notice and provide proof of the pregnancy.

That continuous employment point is particularly interesting in hospitality, where people move jobs relatively often. If you change restaurants at the wrong point in your pregnancy, you may not qualify for SMP from your new employer at all, although you may instead be eligible for Maternity Allowance.

If you do qualify, for the first six weeks you receive 90% of your average weekly earnings. For the following 33 weeks it drops to £194.32 a week, or 90% of your average earnings if that is lower.

That £194.32 works out at roughly £842 a month. You can take up to 52 weeks of statutory maternity leave, but the final 13 weeks are unpaid.

There is, however, a slightly strange complication for some hospitality workers, which is tronc.

SMP is based on the earnings on which Class 1 National Insurance is due. In many restaurants, part of someone’s overall package is paid through an independently run tronc service and those payments may not attract National Insurance. If that is how the tronc is structured, that part of someone’s income is not included when their SMP is calculated.

So imagine someone is described as earning £48,000 a year, but their package is £30,000 base salary plus around £18,000 in tronc.

If that tronc is not subject to Class 1 National Insurance, their first six weeks of SMP would be calculated from the £30,000 base rather than the £48,000 they have actually been accustomed to living on. Ninety per cent of £30,000 works out at roughly £519 a week. If the full £48,000 counted, it would be around £831.

That is a significant difference.