Take-up Rate of Enhanced Shared Parental Leave

Mr Ng Shi Xuan asked the Minister for Social and Family Development whether an update can be provided on the take-up rate of the new Shared Parental Leave since 1 April 2025.

The take-up rate for the new Shared Parental Leave scheme is not yet available. The Shared Parental Leave scheme was introduced on 1 April 2025. Following their Maternity or Paternity Leave, parents have up to a year after their child's birth to utilise their Shared Parental Leave. Thereafter, their employers have an additional three months to submit their claims to the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF). MSF will be able to provide an update on the Shared Parental Leave take-up rate for the 2025 birth cohort in mid-2027.

I thank the Minister of State for his reply. But is there any inkling on what is the take-up rate among new fathers? And at the same time, are there any considerations that the Government can put in to encourage or to support new fathers in applying for Shared Parental Leave?

Speaker, I thank the Member for his questions. As I said in my main reply, we do not really have the data in terms of the claims yet. It is still early days. In fact, on 1 April this year, we have just introduced the 10-week Shared Parental Leave. So, we do not really have the data to be able to speak definitively on that yet.

But having said so, I think the key message that we want to send through the Shared Parental Leave is that parenthood is a shared journey. It is a shared responsibility between both the father and the mother. More importantly, we do want to encourage fathers to take a more active role, in terms of taking care of not just the children in the first year, but beyond that, throughout our children's growth stage.

I think that is something that is very important. MSF continuously works with our partners, including partners such as the Centre for Fathering, to develop programmes and do public outreach to encourage our fathers to do more in terms of playing an active role in our children's development.

I also want to take the opportunity to say that beyond the Shared Parental Leave scheme, to encourage our fathers to do more, we do need to look beyond, perhaps at a societal reset in terms of how our workplace norms need to change, to balance more of family needs. I think these are some of the objectives that the work group chaired by Minister Indranee looking at marriage and parenthood will be looking at.