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As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly write a maternity leave policy for your UK employees.
This still needs a person who signs their name to it.
Can you do it?
5 minutesto a draft.
1 hourto something you’d act on.
Cost, all in£0
Skill neededchat-fluent
Who has to check ita professional
What the alternative costsThe alternative is review by an employment solicitor or specialist HR adviser; no price is stated in the available tool information.
If this goes wrong, an employee may receive incorrect pay or be treated unlawfully, leaving your organisation to correct the decision and manage the employment dispute.
What to actually do
Hand it to a person
The route this page recommends
Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.
Use a tool built for this
Second choiceDo it yourself
The distant thirdA chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.
How to actually do it
- Open the current maternity leave and pay guidance on GOV.UK and save the relevant pages for comparison.
- Gather your existing family leave policy, employment contracts, payroll arrangements, enhanced benefits and HR contact details.
- Paste the prompt into a chatbot and replace each bracketed slot with your organisation's confirmed information.
- Paste the gathered policy and benefits text below the prompt, removing employee names, medical details and other unnecessary personal data.
- Compare every legal requirement and source link in the draft with the current GOV.UK guidance, and mark any point that does not match or cannot be confirmed.
- Send the draft, marked questions and source links to an employment solicitor or specialist HR adviser before issuing it to employees.
Prompt
Draft a UK maternity leave policy for [business name], an employer with [employee population and locations]. Use current official GOV.UK guidance and identify the source link for each legal requirement. Cover statutory maternity leave, statutory maternity pay, eligibility and notification, keeping in touch during leave, antenatal appointments, health and safety, pregnancy-related absence, return to work, flexible working, redundancy protection, discrimination and grievance routes. Include any optional enhanced benefits only if they are listed here: [enhanced benefits]. Reflect these internal arrangements: [internal procedures and contacts]. Use plain British English and make clear which parts are legal requirements, which parts are company choices and which facts still need confirmation. Do not invent pay rates, eligibility, deadlines, contractual terms or company procedures. Do not present uncertain points as settled law. Add a short implementation checklist and a list of questions an employment solicitor should check before publication. This is a drafting exercise, not professional advice.
Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.
What it gets wrong
- AI cannot decide how an unclear contract, enhanced benefit or historic workplace practice should interact with statutory rights.
- AI cannot confirm that your payroll setup will calculate statutory or enhanced maternity pay correctly.
- AI cannot assess a particular employee's discrimination, health and safety or redundancy risk from a generic policy brief.
- AI cannot take responsibility for the policy or defend your organisation if the wording is unlawful.
- AI cannot replace an employment solicitor's review of unusual cases and legally sensitive wording.
What caps this at PARTLY: legal accountability, verification cost and judgement under ambiguity.
How we scored this
Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.
| Axis | Score (0–2) |
|---|---|
| Output | 2 |
| Inputs | 2 |
| Verification | 1 |
| Liability | 0 |
| Effort delta | 2 |
| Total | 7 / 10 |
The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.
FAQ
- Can ChatGPT write a maternity leave policy?
- Yes, it can produce a useful first draft for a UK employer. It cannot take responsibility for the legal wording, so have an employment solicitor or specialist HR adviser check it before publication.
- What should a UK maternity leave policy include?
- It should cover statutory leave and pay, notification, antenatal appointments, health and safety, pregnancy-related absence, contact during leave, return to work, flexible working, redundancy protection, discrimination and complaints. Your enhanced benefits and internal procedures must be added from confirmed company documents.
- Is an AI-written maternity policy legally compliant?
- Not automatically. Compare its legal points with current GOV.UK guidance and obtain employment-law review, because a model can miss how the rules apply to your contracts, benefits and particular workplace arrangements.
- Do I need a solicitor to write a maternity leave policy?
- You can use AI or HR staff to prepare the first draft, but serious legal risks need an employment solicitor's review. Your organisation remains accountable for the policy and its application, and this is not professional advice.
Nearby answers
- Can AI write a redundancy policy for my UK staff?PARTLY
- Can AI write an expenses policy for my UK employees?YES
- Can AI create a menopause policy for my UK workplace?PARTLY
- Can AI create an absence policy for my UK staff?PARTLY
- Can AI write a bonus policy for my UK employees?YES
- Can AI write a health and safety policy for my UK workplace?PARTLY
Assessed by gpt-5.6-luna (gpt-5.6-luna) on 2026-08-13, second-checked by an independent model. Wrong somewhere? Email [email protected] and it gets re-checked.
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