Asked by: Lord Shinkwin (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask His Majesty's Government what progress they have made since the announcement in July 2022 that they intended to raise the regulatory baseline for the accessibility of all new homes to the M4(2) accessible and adaptable standard.
Answered by Baroness Penn - Minister on Leave (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State)
The Government has set out its intention to mandate higher accessibility standards for all new homes by raising the minimum standard in Building Regulations in England in due course. The National Planning Policy Framework sets out that local planning authorities should assess the housing needs for different groups, including people with disabilities, and reflect these in their policies and decisions. Guidance was introduced in June 2019 to help councils implement this policy. The Framework encourages planning policies that make use of the Government’s optional technical standards for accessible and adaptable housing, including M4(3) compliant homes, which can be provided where local plans have identified and evidenced a need for wheelchair-user dwellings.
Asked by: Lord Shinkwin (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask His Majesty's Government whether they intend to revise the National Planning Policy Framework to explicitly require local plans to include a policy and target for new wheelchair-accessible homes of the M4(3) standard.
Answered by Baroness Penn - Minister on Leave (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State)
The Government has set out its intention to mandate higher accessibility standards for all new homes by raising the minimum standard in Building Regulations in England in due course. The National Planning Policy Framework sets out that local planning authorities should assess the housing needs for different groups, including people with disabilities, and reflect these in their policies and decisions. Guidance was introduced in June 2019 to help councils implement this policy. The Framework encourages planning policies that make use of the Government’s optional technical standards for accessible and adaptable housing, including M4(3) compliant homes, which can be provided where local plans have identified and evidenced a need for wheelchair-user dwellings.
Asked by: Lord Shinkwin (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to incentivise and reward those businesses that report on the (1) gender, (2) ethnicity, (3) disability, and (4) LGBTQ+, pay gap.
Answered by Baroness Berridge
Pay gaps are caused by a range of factors. To address them, we must ensure that everybody has equal access to opportunities.
In 2017, we introduced mandatory gender pay gap reporting for large employers, providing an unprecedented level of transparency. The gender pay gap is currently at a record low of 17.3%. However, the gap for full-time employees increased slightly to 8.9%. To address the drivers of the gap, we’ve set out a package of commitments aiming to empower women from school right through to retirement.
The Government ran a consultation from October 2018 to January 2019 on Ethnicity Pay Reporting and received over 300 detailed responses. The Government met with businesses and representative organisations to understand the barriers towards reporting and what information could be published to allow for meaningful action to be taken. We have also run voluntary methodology testing with a broad range of businesses to better understand the complexities outlined in the consultation using real payroll data and will share next steps in due course.
Calculation and monitoring of disability and LGBT pay gaps raises significant issues of self-reporting and data accuracy and this data is not widely collected by employers. Although we have no plans for data collection of pay for these characteristics, we want to achieve practical changes for disabled people, which remove barriers and increase opportunity. The Government will publish an ambitious ‘National Strategy for Disabled People’. We will ensure that the lived experience of disabled people is at the heart of the new National Strategy and focus on the issues that disabled people say affect them the most.
The 108,000 respondents to the National LGBT Survey told us that their priority in the workplace is to tackle discrimination. So the Government Equalities Office is exploring the creation of a package of measures to tackle LGBT workplace discrimination. LGBT people should be able to be themselves in the workplace, so that they can do their best work and achieve their full potential.
Diverse workforces make good business sense. For example, organisations in the top 25% for gender diversity on their executive teams are 21% more likely to have profits above their industry average, and organisations where over 20% of managers are women have been associated with higher performance than organisations with less than 15% representation of women.