Our company’s policy is to offer only statutory maternity pay, with no enhanced company maternity pay scheme in place. However, I have been approached by a manager who wants to provide enhanced maternity pay for a high-performing employee in her team. How do I handle it?

Lindsay Gibson writes:

There will be no problem with offering enhanced maternity pay to the high-performing employee, provided a couple of precautionary steps are taken. 

The risk with providing the enhanced maternity terms to the high-performing employee, is that employees taking maternity leave in the future could try to argue that they too were entitled to receive the enhanced terms instead of the statutory minimum. The basis for such an argument would be that