Fairer Maternity Pay for Twins and Triplets

Having twins or triplets is financially ruinous. There's the £20,000 hit you face in the first year alone, a 15% income reduction, the need to buy two or more of everything and the cost of a new car and even a new house. Despite this, you only get one lot of maternity pay, as opposed to someone having two singletons in succession who receives double the pay.

This is not fair. For parents. For children. For society.

Moving to maternity pay per baby is a step towards equity for families with multiples, ensuring one less thing to worry ...

Having twins or triplets is financially ruinous. There's the £20,000 hit you face in the first year alone, a 15% income reduction, the need to buy two or more of everything and the cost of a new car and even a new house. Despite this, you only get one lot of maternity pay, as opposed to someone having two singletons in succession who receives double the pay.

This is not fair. For parents. For children. For society.

Moving to maternity pay per baby is a step towards equity for families with multiples, ensuring one less thing to worry about for the 84% of families who have one or more parent experiencing emotional or psychological challenges in that first year.

For too long, our families have been treated by government as second-class citizens.

Tell your MP that this must change. Email them now!

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Ensure your voice is heard by sending an email today, urging decision makers to change our unfair maternity pay law.

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Subject:

Did you know that around 1 in 50 people in your constituency could be twins or multiples? Having twins or triplets can be financially ruinous. Yet despite the impact on families in your area, support is currently inadequate.

Nobody plans for two (or more!) babies at once, yet from the moment you find out you’re pregnant, the inequalities begin: a higher risk pregnancy, massive financial burden, mental health issues, lack of available support, the list goes on.

To cap it all off, you know that if you’d had two babies in successive years, you would have had double the pay (and therefore half the stress!). That’s despite evidence showing that people having twins face at least a £20,000 immediate financial hit. How can a natural occurrence – the number of babies in your pregnancy – lead to such unfair discrimination? How can our society justify this Twin Tax?

I’m asking that this inequality is tackled with a simple solution: maternity pay per baby not per pregnancy.

Please join me and Twins Trust in campaigning on behalf of the approximately 1 in 50 people in your constituency and across the UK who are twins or multiples. Together, we can address this inequality and make life fairer for families.

What you could do:
Write to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions   
Table a Parliamentary Question on the subject 
Meet with Twins Trust (email them at campaigns@twinstrust.org)

Thank you for your time.

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