Sweden just allowed grandparents to take parental leave – the UK should do the same

There are plenty of reasons to be jealous of the Swedes. Their society is famously egalitarian. So far do they seem to have solved the conundrum of how to strike a better work-life balance that they even have a word – fika – to describe the act of leaving your desk to have a coffee and a chat. And their capital city has an entire museum dedicated to Abba. Now they’ve given us yet another reason to feel envy: they’ve just improved their already world-leading parental leave policy, putting other countries to shame.

At the start of this month, Sweden launched a new law allowing parents to transfer some of their paid parental leave allocation over to the grandparents during a child’s first year. A couple will be able to re-allocate 45 days of their joint 480-day allowance (240 days each), while a single mum or dad can pass on 90 days. The move comes 50 years after the Scandinavian nation became the first ever country to introduce paid parental leave that could be split between both parents.

The UK would do well to take note. Our childcare system is among the most expensive in the developed world; prices here are now double the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average. For some mothers, it’s barely worth returning to work when their childcare costs might outstrip their salary. Last year, a survey from the charity Pregnant Then Screwed found that 76 per cent of mums who pay for childcare believed that it no longer made sense for them to work. It’s situations like this that help keep the gender pay gap alive and well. And if your career is a big part of your identity, having no choice but to put it aside must be incredibly frustrating and isolating.

Against this backdrop, it’s hardly a surprise that many parents are leaning on their own parents to fill the gaps with free babysitting while they’re at the office, or during the notoriously tricky school summer holidays. The cost of living crisis will have only made this reliance more pronounced. According to a 2023 study from insurance providers SunLife, 53 per cent of grandparents are providing some form of childcare during the working week, collectively saving a staggering estimated £96bn in nursery and childminder fees.

A set-up like this might well remove the barriers preventing parents (read: mums, in most cases) from going back to work. But it’s a sticking plaster on a bigger problem. And what about granny and grandpa? People are living longer and retiring later; grandparents may well still be working themselves, and feel compelled to step back earlier than they’d like over childcare guilt. Statistics from Age UK estimate that around one million grandparents over the age of 50 have stopped work or cut down their hours in order to provide regular support for the grandkids. Expecting your own parents to muck in for free just feels like pushing the same problem back for another generation to deal with; it’s also a personal solution to a collective problem.

Giving older employees the chance to take, say, a few weeks or months of paid leave to help out with their grandchildren doesn’t just take some of the pressure off the parents. It also means that grandparents don’t have to make a choice between supporting their younger family members and continuing to work (or, at the very least, it means they can postpone that decision). “Allowing parents to allocate some of their paid leave to grandparents would recognise that many of them are still in employment, and themselves juggling careers with helping to look after their grandchildren,” agrees Justine Roberts, founder and CEO of Mumsnet and Gransnet. As the workforce gets older, it makes sense that businesses should start offering benefits to better reflect that (see also: better menopause policies) and to encourage their most experienced staff to stick around.

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The wheels were once in motion for a policy of this kind in the UK. In 2015, a few months after the introduction of shared parental leave, then chancellor George Osborne announced his intention to extend this provision to grandparents. Under this approach, eligible parents would have been able to split up to 50 weeks of leave and 37 weeks of statutory pay with their parents. The new plan was meant to be put in place by 2018, but it ended up being sidelined while the government tried to investigate the sluggish uptake for shared parental leave overall (in those first few years, only an estimated 2 per cent of eligible couples had opted in).

Grandparental leave hasn’t been picked up since, and it seems to have fallen off the political agenda completely – despite the fact that childcare ended up being a major talking point in the general election, with the Liberal Democrats offering to expand paternity leave and Labour promising to create 100,000 new nursery places.

But although there’s no legal entitlement for grandparents to take time to care for their grandchildren, a handful of employers are starting to offer some form of leave for their older workers. One of the first companies to do so in the UK was, rather aptly, Saga, purveyors of insurance and holidays for the over-fifties crowd. In 2021, they announced that their employees would be able to take a week of paid leave to celebrate the birth of a grandchild.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to introducing wider “grandpaternity” plans over here, though, is the fact that the fundamentals of our current parental leave just aren’t that good. The eligibility criteria for shared parental leave is complex – many co-parents will find they don’t actually qualify for it – and the statutory pay is low, capped at around £184 a week or at 90 per cent of average earnings, whichever figure happens to be lower. (In Sweden, by contrast, parents receive 80 per cent of their salary for 390 days.)

Is it any wonder that enthusiasm for this policy is still pretty muted? An evaluation report from 2023 found that, eight years on from its introduction, only 1 per cent of mothers and 5 per cent of fathers had opted into a policy that was supposed to be a game-changer for gender equality.

In Sweden, Roberts notes, “dads take around 30 per cent of all parental leave days, and much more progress has been made on equalising the responsibilities of parenthood”, so grandparental leave “may be a logical next step”. But introducing it “without tackling this fundamental imbalance in our [UK] system would simply perpetuate a status quo that sees women shoulder the bulk of the childcare burden”.

“Grandpaternity” leave isn’t a silver bullet for the UK’s childcare nightmare. Not all grandparents will want to sign up; not all parents have the safety net of supportive, healthy parents of their own living close by. But providing it as an option would better reflect the reality of parenting in 2024. Hopefully, Sweden has given our new government some food for thought.