Family-focused Policies

To ensure continuous improvement across our policy offering, we actively listen to colleagues through our colleague experience feedback forums, our employee-led networks, our employee representatives, and regular industry benchmarking. As a result of this engagement, we have a new partner leave policy live from January 2023. The policy supports all eligible employees with significantly more time away from work to help their partner look after their new child, whether the new child has arrived through birth, adoption or surrogacy. The policies introduce significantly enhanced pay and leave for eligible fathers and partners to share the caring responsibilities. The policy is open to both same-sex parents and heterosexual parents. This ultimately champions the potential of both parents and promotes gender equality in the workplace.

As a purpose-led organisation, we also recognise we have an important role in supporting employees with other types of caring responsibilities, which is why we updated our carers’ leave policy in 2022 to make it easier to request carers’ leave – and it can now be taken a day at a time instead of in one-week blocks.