Should the UK introduce six weeks of well-paid paternity leave for fathers?

A slender win for well-paid paternity leave — 44 votes to 36 — reads less like consensus than like a coalition assembled from opposite ends of experience, with the middle unconvinced. The overall figure flatters the yes side; strip away one bloc and it looks far shakier.

The real story sits in the age breakdown. Voters in their late twenties and early thirties, the cohort most likely to be weighing shared parental leave against a newborn right now, backed the policy almost to a person, while every single under-25 rejected it outright — a striking reversal for a policy aimed squarely at new parents, and a hint that the youngest voters here see it as an abstract cost rather than a lived need. The 55-64s, meanwhile, dug in against it, the only other group to tip decisively no, suggesting a familiar taxpayer-versus-beneficiary instinct: those past the parenting years less willing to underwrite someone else's.

That fracture echoes the wider argument this briefing was built on — whether the state should keep tinkering with schemes like Shared Parental Leave that Bath's own researchers found barely moved fathers' take-up, or spend more decisively on a wage-replacement model with the £12.8 billion benefit case attached. Men here split exactly down the middle, undercutting any easy story about fathers simply voting their own interest.

A policy meant to normalise fathers taking leave found its firmest support among those about to need it, and its firmest resistance among those who never will again.