Gender Pay Gaps

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

Wednesday 8th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I certainly agree that women have waited an awfully long time not only for these regulations to come into force but for the gender pay gap to narrow. The noble Baroness said that the GPG has not narrowed. It has narrowed marginally—not enough, and there is more to do—but it is quite pleasing that there are 366 employers who, though they do not have to produce a gender pay gap return, have done so in this second reporting year. Last year, 48% of employers produced an action plan, which is very pleasing indeed. The Government have provided an online toolkit, and there have been 14,000 views of that online. We are slowly moving in the right direction, but we must remember that what we have done is ground-breaking globally.

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, the Royal Statistical Society has found that the government system used to report pay gaps is flawed in some important respects, open to gaming and very difficult for people to understand. Can the Government please look at this and consider implementing some of the recommendations, such as introducing online gender pay gap reporting calculators with built-in sanity checks, to ensure accurate reporting and prevent implausible entries?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right to point out that accurate reporting is crucial to understanding what organisations are doing to reduce the gender pay gap and crucial to ensuring that there is no gaming of the system, as she points out. Based on our research with employers, we know that the majority were able to understand the gender pay gap reporting system and are correctly reporting their data; 95% are reporting ahead of the deadline, which is very good news indeed. As she knows, the EHRC is responsible for enforcing the regulations and is looking at any statistically improbable data. The Government Equalities Office has already implemented some of the recommendations from the Royal Statistical Society’s report—so I thank the noble Baroness for raising the issue—including improvements to the guidance and the statistical sanity checks.