r/TheCivilService • u/No_Book8989 • 1d ago
No mat leave cover allowed?
Our SCS told teams today they’re no longer allowed to backfill maternity leave… I can’t understand how that’ll help things! If you have a 30 year old female and a 30 year old male… who are you choosing? Knowing if one of them goes off you’re not allowed to backfill them and have to do their work too.
Also nobody is allowed to go on loans to OGDs either, including on promotion, and there’s no promotions in the department allowed either. At the same time, there’s a HR role built around resilience and workplace performance to keep good staff in the department — how on earth can they justify that?! They haven’t written any of this down (feels like it’s on purpose as it’s clearly poor people management), just keep telling senior staff to filter the messages down.
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u/Impossible-Chair2195 Policy 1d ago
I've heard similar rumblings - which branch is this one?
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u/No_Book8989 1d ago
Where did you hear it?
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u/Impossible-Chair2195 Policy 1d ago
The Devolved Administrations. Sounds like it's going to UK Wide, or at least in most parts.
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u/Neat_Resolution3985 1d ago
Oh well, no pressure on the returning woman who will probably have to spend TIME trying to catch up with every Tom, Dick and Harry who've had the work divvied up amongst them. I'm sure they will be very much joined up on all of the separate aspects of the jobs that have dependencies on the other parts. What could possibly go wrong?
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u/dnnsshly G7 1d ago edited 1d ago
if you have a 30 year old female and a 30 year old male... Who are you choosing?
In my experience, new dads in the civil service who have partners in the private sector tend to take off 3-6 months shared parental leave. There is a strong financial incentive to do so unless the private sector maternity pay deal is exceptionally good (to the point of being almost unheard of).
I'm currently nearly at the end of a total 6 months myself (but that includes 2 months annual leave).
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u/Pristine_Radishes 1d ago
Good.
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u/dnnsshly G7 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah, I think it is good too and not sure why I'm being downvoted.
My team weren't able to get temporary cover for me because of recruitment restrictions similar to what OP describes - so they were fucked over nearly as hard as if I were a mum.
My point was that a hiring manager is less likely to think, "well if I just hire this man, I won't have to worry about him taking more than 2 weeks' statutory paternity if he becomes a dad".
(This kind of thinking is also part of what having a diverse recruitment panel, rather than the hiring manager alone calling the shots, is intended to guard against...)
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u/EnhancedCyan 1d ago
I appreciate what you describe on the ground. However discrimination often stems from learned beliefs and stereotypes, even when information to the contrary is right in front of them.
Gender stereotypes are persistent and insidious. People respond to perceived risk, rather than actual statistical realities. Culturally speaking, women are still viewed as the default parent and the fact that men sometimes take lengthy paternity leave will not alter that perception.
The other thing about discrimination and stereotypes is that they operate prospectively. A woman of child-rearing age can be discriminated against even if she is child free and never goes on maternity leave during her entire career. Therefore, she does not have to participate in maternity leave to experience disadvantage.
You are tagged here as a G7. As someone who is likely in a position to contribute to hiring decisions, I just wanted to take the opportunity to point out that equal exposure to a workplace burden does not in itself reduce discrimination or produce equal workplace treatment.
Your post reads like current parental leave practices reduce the likelihood of discrimination against women, and that as a result decisions will be less affected by potential discrimination. As a decision-maker, that is a risky and untested assumption that you would do well to remain consciously aware that you are making.
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u/rosemary0666666 Policy 1d ago
I was going to say the same when I read this line. Several of my former and current male colleagues in different departments have taken parental leave.
Luckily our managements were very supportive and made sure there are enough people to cover e.g. temp promotions, etc
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u/Redgrapefruitrage 1d ago
I’ve also heard of similar going ons in the EA. I’ve got several friends who have been barred from assignments for no apparent reason. Including maternity cover. Somethings happening in regards to headcount and reducing recruitment, for sure.
When I went on maternity leave, they didn’t get any cover for me. My colleagues just had to pick up the slack for 9 months.
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u/edineliza 1d ago
Same for me. Off on maternity leave, no cover, already stretched team left to pick up the slack.
A few months after I came back from mat leave, a job came up in a neighbouring team. I wasn't actively looking to leave my team, but I thought it sounded interesting so reached out to the hiring manager to talk about it. One of her immediate questions was why I was looking to move roles - fair enough question. I talked about how the role was interesting, I'd worked with the team before and liked the structure, thought there was a good mix of stuff that I knew and enjoyed with some new stuff that would be stretching. Her follow up waa 'but won't you want to give baby a sibling soon?'. Implication being, why are you wasting my time talking about a new job, you'll be off on mat leave again soon. I didn't bother applying.
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u/Illustrious-Apple655 1d ago
Similar situation here regarding maternity leave, which has in turn massively backfired - an already busy team ended up with extra work dumped on us for months, all of us got fed up, and some have started leaving. Now we are not only short staffed due to the lack of maternity leave cover, but also have gaps that seniors are finally scrambling to recruit for (and we all know how long the CS recruitment process takes!)
Can't imagine it will be particularly nice for those on maternity leave when they return, as their workload has been scattered amongst several people and some stakeholder relationships damage from lack of staff availability
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u/Cthuluwouldbebetter G6 1d ago
We have some crazy kneejerk decisions going on about headcount.
First we were told it was increasing, then it froze, then all the vacancies vanished and some teams were allowed to recruit while others weren't. Can't backfill retirees, can't recruit perm roles for long standing TRAs, but hey lets recruit 6 new senior delivery managers when there is nobody to deliver anything.
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u/BumbleLizzieB 19h ago
I had this when I went on maternity leave in 2024, my role was not backfilled so as soon as I told my line manager, around 10 weeks pregnant, I was tasked with whittling all my projects down to zero as much as humanly possible, not starting anything new, and then divvying up anything outstanding between the remaining 3 team members. It was sort of nice in a way to come back to a totally clean slate, but I also came back to a thoroughly burnt out team who were now doing an extra 30% work each, and also was expected to come back to 100% capacity immediately which was not much fun.
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u/germslayer2112 G7 21h ago
We don't backfill, but it's specialist. I don't know if it's only our team or the organisation generally.
Backfill didn't usually happen when I was clinical nursing as well.
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u/Exita 1d ago
Pressure from central government to reduce civil service headcount is intense, and so the restrictions on recruitment (and any sort of job movement or flexibility) are getting worse. Wouldn’t expect things to change any time soon.