Gender Pay Gap

Baroness Prosser Excerpts

Monday 26th November 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Prosser]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to require organisations to produce action plans to respond to their gender pay gap reports.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted that over 10,000 employers reported gender pay gap data in the first year, but reporting is just the first step. We believe that the transparency created by reporting will motivate employers to take action. However, to close the gap we need wider cultural change, which cannot be imposed from above. That is why the Government are working with employers to tackle the drivers of the gap, and we have introduced a range of initiatives to support that work.

[Baroness Prosser (Lab)]

Well, sometimes I am a bit speechless over all this. It goes on year in, year out, and nothing really happens. I welcome the initiative to publicise the gender pay gap, of course, and I welcome the work that is being done to encourage more women on to public boards. However, the pay gap is actually at its most pronounced among slightly older women who have given up more productive or lucrative careers to have children, and who then cannot afford paid childcare and so move into part-time employment.

There are a number of tried and tested initiatives which have proved very helpful to this cohort of women, and which have been run in the past through the Government Equalities Office: for example, women-only skills programme initiatives to break down full-time jobs into part-time jobs. Do the Government have any intention of introducing any programmes to enable women to work to their capacity and at the same time help them to contribute more to business and the economy?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for asking that follow-up question. I am slightly disappointed that she was speechless at my initial Answer—maybe she was speechless with joy. One of the things on which I was speaking to the Women’s Business Council this morning was precisely the cohort she talked about—older women who have perhaps left work for certain reasons and then gone back later—and how it can help. The Women’s Business Council is focused very much on the cohort of women from 50 to 64 in particular, on what support it can give, and on what the Government can support in this endeavour. So we are doing things around the gender pay gap from which that cohort in particular should benefit.