How to Apply Statutory Parental Bereavement Pay

The new Statutory Parental Bereavement Leave and Pay Act will give all employed parents or primary carers a day-one right to 2 weeks of leave and pay if they lose a child under the age of 18, or suffer a stillbirth from 24 weeks of pregnancy with effect from 5 April 2020.  This payment will be known as SPBP.

To qualify for SPBP, the employee must meet the following conditions

• Employees with 26 weeks of continuous service will receive paid leave at the statutory rate.

• Employees average earnings must be above the National Insurance Lower Earnings Limit in order to qualify for this statutory payment.

The leave can either be taken in one block or in 2 separate blocks of one week.  It can be taken within a 56 week window from the child’s death.

Parents will not need to provide the employer with a death certificate as evidence.

The functionality provided for SPBP is as follows:

• A new payment type has been added to the pay code types called SPBP.  Please ensure that you add the payment type to your pay code list so that you are able to make this type of payment.

• In Pay Company, there are new fields for the entry of the nominal code for the financials extract to allocate the cost.

• In the Payee – YTD figures screen, a SPBP YTD field has been added and is visible from tax year 2020/21.

• In the pay batch screen, users can enter the statutory value to be paid and the system will apply the employer recovery and compensation in the wage costs stage.

• SPBP pay code value has been added to the Gross to Net Reports – Statutory Payments column

• The FPS generation process includes the SPBP YTD field required by the HMRC.

• The EPS has been updated to include SPBP recovery and compensation fields for the period as well as the YTD.

At this current time, the Child Related Pay Screen is not available in the payee screen to determine if the payee meets the qualifying conditions and to automatically apply the 2 week payment. Should you need to pay this child related payment, please refer to https://www.gov.uk/maternity-paternity-calculator  to check if the payee is entitled to receive this payment.  The HMRC are yet to update their calculators with this new payment type and is normally the case that this will be from the start of the new tax year.

Once the qualifying conditions have been met, the values can be entered at the Manual Input stage of the pay batch.  Ensure the value is applied against your SPBP pay code type so that the system will determine the employer recovery and compensation.