General election live updates: Sunak and Starmer resume campaigns after D-Day events

The Liberal Democrats’ main policy announcement for Friday is a promise to increase statutory maternity leave, if they win the election.

A mum on statutory maternity leave normally gets 90% of her salary for the first six weeks and £184.03 for the next 33 weeks.

The Lib Dems say they’d boost this to £350. Statutory paternity pay would also rise and an extra “dad month” would be added to the two weeks currently available to encourage more fathers to take parental leave, party leader Ed Davey says.

This would be available to all self-employed parents too.

The bill, which the party estimates will cost £2.4bn a year, would be paid for by “clamping down on tax avoidance and evasion”.

But as Christine Farquharson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out, getting significant amounts of revenue from the so-called “tax gap” is certainly easier said than done – especially since much of the existing evasion comes from small businesses operating cash-in-hand.

Research from the independent research group shows maternity pay has been left “lagging behind” in recent years, with only three other OECD countries less financially generous.