A Working for an MP Guide
Maternity Leave and Pay for MPs’ Staff
First Published	22 May 2007	w4mp
Last Updated	26 July 2010	w4mp
Last Reviewed	March 2013	ES
Revision notes

As you are individually employed by your MP, the terms of your specific maternity / paternity pay will be set out in your own contract.
This is very likely to be the same as, or very similar to, the IPSA standard contract, which can be found here.

While you are off on maternity leave, your MP can claim through IPSA for the cost of hiring maternity cover through the contingency budget. Happily they now have a special form for this rather than asking MPs to fill in the standard contingency form with its questions on how the need for a contingency payment arose and what steps they could have taken to avoid it. Hooray.

They also issued this statement to clarify how such claims are processed:

Maternity, Paternity and Redundancy Pay
We have received a number of queries about maternity pay and other similar costs, therefore we wish to make it clear that IPSA will pay any necessary expenditure on maternity, paternity or adoptive leave for MPs’ staff. We will also pay for the cost of cover to replace the staff member on leave, provided the cover meets the normal Scheme rules. This is paid from the contingency fund – not because we are exercising discretion on whether to make these payments, but so that these payments do not impact on your capped staffing budget.