“When we found out about the fertility benefits, our jaws just dropped,” says Sarah, 36. “We couldn’t believe our luck because we’d already started thinking about starting a family. It just felt like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe we’ve got access to this’.”
The couple, who weren’t eligible for treatment on the NHS in their area at the time, saved almost £30,000. “It’s a crazy amount and paying for it ourselves would have really stretched us. It’s made us a lot more financially comfortable that we didn’t have to,” she says.
An exclusive Standard survey on what matters to Londoners when it comes to their fertility has found that such workplace policies are now at the top of the wishlist.
A huge 92.1 per cent of you told us that companies should offer IVF leave. Seven in 10 (69.8 per cent) of you would consider freezing your eggs to help with money worries and to free up more time to focus on your jobs, but only 6.8 per cent have actually been able to do so. While 91.3 per cent of you felt that fertility testing should be available on the NHS.
It’s perhaps no surprise, with couples meeting and starting families later, and many treatments not available on the NHS due to postcode lotteries and Covid delays — with particular barriers remaining for same-sex partnerships and individuals. According to the Fertility Network UK 3.5million people (one in six couples) are now affected by fertility issues.
Not to mention that a round of egg-freezing costs on average £6,000 and storage can be up to £400 a year. In 2022, the Fertility Network found that the average spend on IVF is £13,750 but that some people were handing over up to £100,000 — leaving them struggling to recover financially.
Consequently, UK companies are gradually waking up to the level of demand for help, implementing policies and benefits for women and men: from financial help for egg or sperm freezing, IVF, adoption and surrogacy, to paid leave and counselling. Many are partnering with third party fertility providers, such as Fertifa, Carrot and Peppy.
Spotify gives London employees £40,000, Apple and Meta subsidise egg freezing for London staff up to a reported £16,000; law firm Cooley offers £45,000 and Goldman Sachs provides £15,500 towards treatments. But the field is expanding, with names like Lululemon, Space NK, Co-op and M&S
It’s a significant shift. Only a few years ago, your boss knowing that you wanted to have kids was seen as a gross invasion of privacy. ‘Company benefits’ were more likely to mean gym memberships or travel card loans. “It was just not discussed at work at all,” says Helen Beedham, a business consultant and co-founder of the Workplace Fertility Community, who had her daughter via IVF, 12 years ago.
“I was going across London twice a day for blood tests and injecting in my client’s loos. It was a huge amount to juggle personally and financially. And it was definitely seen as a ‘women’s issue’ — I think there’s more understanding now that men can have fertility problems, too.”
Covid, she says, has put wellbeing firmly under the spotlight for employers.
“The pandemic gave us a far greater understanding that we are people outside the office, with home lives that matter just as much as work,” she says. “People are more prepared to stand up for what they want and what matters to them, and they’re moving jobs if they’re not getting that support.” A study by healthcare network Maven found that 70 per cent of millennials would change their job to ensure they have fertility coverage. Fertifa reports that 53 per cent would stay longer with their employer if they covered the cost of treatment.
UK companies are following a path already trodden by Silicon Valley and Wall Street, which introduced benefits like egg-freezing almost a decade ago as a way to retain talent in an aggressively competitive atmosphere, says Eileen Burbidge, who heads up Fertifa — which launched in 2019, and has worked with close to 100 UK companies, providing reimbursement packages and education.
She says that Britain is now ahead of most European countries but still lags behind America, where around 5 per cent of companies with more than 500 employees — such as Meta, Google, Amazon, eBay and Reddit — offer egg-freezing. “Since Covid, companies have recognised a duty of care to employee well being that we've not seen before,” says Burbidge. “But they also had the pressure of trying to attract talent amid ‘the great resignation’ and people reconsidering whether they want to continue climbing the ladder at all.”
Indeed, it’s hard to get away from the fact that having friendly fertility policies helps attract and retain talent. Critics argue that it’s a cynical ploy to create the illusion of a more diverse workplace. There have been concerns that egg-freezing is essentially a way for firms to pay women to delay motherhood and focus on work. Burbidge, who previously worked for Apple, calls it “an unfair characterisation” and points out that many company schemes have been driven by employee demand.
But Dr Lucy van de Wiel, lecturer in global health and social medicine at King’s College London, sounds a note of caution. “At an individual level, it's great to have your costs covered,” she says. “But the question is whether we want to give that kind of power over our private lives to our employers.
“It’s presented like ‘oh, we really care about you — and hopefully they do — but it's also a way of retaining or attracting people. They invest in these policies to make themselves look good to the world.” It can also, she adds, encourage women in their 20s to go through an “invasive surgery” which they likely don’t need — less than 10 per cent of frozen eggs in the UK are ever used. “It can easily become a marketing exercise where people are being made to feel that they should be concerned about their fertility. Are you solving a problem or creating one?” she says.
Regardless, the numbers show this is something that Londoners want. So who is doing it well? The biggest pots of cash generally still come from the Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms: Spotify gives London employees £40,000, Apple and Meta subsidise egg freezing for London staff up to a reported £16,000; law firm Cooley offers £45,000 and Goldman Sachs provides £15,500 towards treatments. But the field is expanding, with names like Lululemon, Space NK, Co-op and M&S.
At LinkedIn, employees and their partners are eligible to claim money back for treatments up to £23,000. It also has a notable focus on counselling, with confidential help available for employees and their families 24/7. Its vice president of HR, Lisa Finnegan, spearheaded the programme after experiencing miscarriage and going through IVF herself. “My own journey to having my daughter was not straightforward and I fully empathise,” she says.
“As well as the financial benefits, we prioritise creating an open culture where people feel comfortable opening up about what they are going through. It makes a huge impact on people’s lives at what can be an extremely challenging and emotional time.”
It can easily become a marketing exercise where people are being made to feel that they should be concerned about their fertility. Are you solving a problem or creating one?
The focus at Monzo, which has 3,052 UK employees and a London head office, is on paid leave for all employees and their partners to attend appointments. Impressively, you only need to have worked at the bank for 13 weeks to qualify. “We did that purposely because we believe that it is important that people don't feel trapped in their careers because they're choosing to have a family,” says Tara Ryan, VP of People Experience. “I've had people sending me DMs saying how much they appreciate the fact that we've thought about this. It's been super successful.”
International legal firm Osborne Clarke, which has its London office in Barbican, has a hands-on employee group that guides fellow colleagues by sharing stories of others in the company who have sought treatment, gone through adoption or experienced baby loss — on this, it progressively also offers two weeks of paid leave to those who have lost a pregnancy due to unsuccessful embryo transfers.
Channel 4 is also doing things differently, working with health provider Hertility to offer staff and their partners at-home blood tests to highlight why they may be struggling to conceive. It has a specific policy to support employees with conditions such as endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) — recognising that for many, reproductive health doesn’t start with egg freezing or IVF.
Balderton Capital, an investment firm of 70 employees in King’s Cross, spent a year deciding how best to implement its fertility benefits. “We took a lot of time, because we didn't want to give the impression that we were saying, ‘right, ladies, you've got to freeze your eggs if you want to have a job here’,” says Chantal Cantle, its Head of People. “There was a lot of navel gazing. It wasn't like, ‘Oh yeah, let's get that [policy] off the shelf’.”
The company offers a capped ‘wallet’ that staff can dip into to cover costs of everything from egg-freezing to reproductive investigations and menopause — importantly, “it all remains anonymous, we just see an amount and that is then paid,” says Cantle.
That was the experience of Sarah and Victoria, who are now expecting a baby having gone through three rounds of egg collection between them. Whenever they had to pay anything at the clinic, they had a set of Carrot account details from which the money came out — they only have to cover the tax.
“It felt like we were really supported, especially as a gay couple,” says Sarah, who works for a fintech company. “The treatment itself is intense and if we’d not had the benefit I think I would have kept it under my hat and made excuses when I had appointments. We’re both nearly 40, so I think we still have that mindset of there are certain things that need to stay private at work. But this opened the door to that conversation which has been such an emotional relief. I don’t know what our future plans are. But I would look at a company in the future and view them favourably for doing this. To be honest, I think I’d expect it.”
