I had to save £15.5k to afford to have baby - equivalent to a house deposit - maternity pay isn’t excessive

A new mum saved £15.5k for maternity leave - so she could afford to have a baby.

Alice Gregory was "shocked" when she found out the statutory maternity pay in the UK was just £184.03 a week - after falling pregnant late last year.

Alice realised the money would not cover the bills and started saving straight away so she didn't have to be reliant on her partner Dion McGrath’s support carer salary.

In nine months, Alice managed to save £7,000 from her salary and £8,500 from side hustles such as surveys and freelancing, but felt a "pressure" to work to afford her own maternity leave. Even after having her daughter, now three months old, she continued to pick up clients to keep her emergency savings pot topped up.

Alice asked her followers on her TikTok @alicesidehustler if they had saved anything for their maternity - and some said they had saved as much as £20k.

She said: "People were saving like £15k - it's like a deposit on a house."

Legally companies have to pay 90 percent of a salary for six weeks, but Alice's work paid her at that rate for 12 weeks. She will then receive the rate of £184.03 per week - £736.12 a month before tax.

Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch recently suggested maternity pay had "gone too far" and was "excessive". She later said she had been "misrepresented" and her comment had been on a wider point about cutting regulatory burdens on business.

Alice, 30, a head of marketing, from Anglesey in Wales, said: "For me personally it's a low amount of money. It's saying new mums - you're not worthy of being able to get that minimum wage.

“It should be a really special time in a couple's life. You try and be present but you can feel this creeping anxiety about money."