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The Jersey Chamber of Commerce
Chamber House, 25 Pier Road, St Helier Jersey, Channel Islands, JE2 4XW
Tel: 01534 724536
E-mail: admin@jerseychamber.com Website: www.jerseychamber.com
Thursday 16th March 2017
FAMILY FRIENDLY CONSULTATION
JERSEY CHAMBER OF COMMERCE - OFFICIAL RESPONSE
As with all business related government consultations, the Jersey Chamber of Commerce is always eager to provide feedback and an official response on behalf of the business community. On this occasion, however, we feel that there has not been sufficient time since the introduction of the existing Family Friendly legislation (which came into force on the 1st September 2015) to provide comprehensive analysis, regarding the impact of the current rights, with a view to providing feedback on whether changes should be made.
Chamber and its members are fully supportive of legislation that provides protective measures to support family life and a recent survey with our members, regarding family friendly legislation, illustrated that 93% of those taking part in the survey (which was 14% of Chambers 540 member organisations) said they did not find any difficulty in applying the current statutory maternity rights. Of the 7% that did find the current maternity provision difficult to implement, a number of anecdotal examples were supplied:
- Staff have left as we can not afford to pay for long term leave'
- In a small workforce, losing a fee earner has significant impact on revenue'
- We are a small organisation and have difficulty covering maternity leave and the cost involved'
We had hoped for a higher participation rate from our own membership survey but we do not feel 14% is representative enough to provide thorough assessment of how businesses are coping with the existing provision and therefore, we would conclude that it is too soon to provide thorough feedback on legislation that has only been in place for 18 month.