The Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch has said that the current level of maternity pay is ‘excessive’ and says that people need to exercise more ‘personal responsibility’
Interviewed on Times Radio she said that statutory maternity pay has the ‘function of a tax’ and has ‘gone too far’
‘We need to have more personal responsibility. There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies’
Asked the same, fellow candidate Tom Tugendhat said it is “absolutely not my place to tell women how to live” when asked if women should be having more children and spending more time bringing them up.
