Employment Rights Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 27th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure, as always, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes. I also add my congratulations to my noble friend the Minister and today’s four maidens. May they thrive in their new place of work—if not technically employment.

As my noble friend Lady Prosser so ably reminded us, this December will mark 50 years since the implementation of the Equal Pay Act 1970. However, the gender pay gap for all employees was still 13% last year and highest in our much-celebrated and lucrative financial sector. I suggest—at grave risk of being hit by a thunderbolt—that that Act contained a fatal design flaw that has been replicated in its successor statute, the Equality Act. It is left to an individual woman worker, with or without the aid of her union—though in recent years some unions have done valiant work on this—to, first, find out what her male colleagues are being paid for the same work or work of equivalent value and, secondly, in the event of disparity, to sue her employer.

With respect, for most women that scenario is cloud-cuckoo-land. I hope that noble Lords who have heard me raise this during previous Women’s History Months will forgive the repetition but, as legislators, would we dream of providing such a paltry enforcement mechanism in any other vital area of regulation? Would we leave children to investigate and litigate school standards, consumers to individually police food standards, and citizens to do the same for environmental protection, or building or nuclear safety, with no relevant state enforcement agency, even as a backstop? Surely the time has come to right this historic and continuing wrong. Even the most zealous free marketeers cannot seriously advocate impunity for employers who routinely and exploitatively discriminate against women or other groups in the context of remuneration for work.

HMRC already has access to payroll information for tax purposes, so it cannot be beyond the wit of policymakers to extend that remit and purpose to random spot-checking for equal pay as well. Indeed, this is one area where AI tools could come to the aid of employees rather than being a threat to them. Discrepancies could then trigger closer investigation, warning notices and eventual penalties in the event of persistent non-compliance and illegality.

I know that many have focused their equal pay efforts on pay transparency duties for larger employers, but this seems to simultaneously lack both realism and ambition. Again, would we allow food or drugs manufacturers, whatever their size, to market products unfit for consumption as long as they were labelled?

I ask my noble friend the Minister what plans His Majesty’s Government have in this area. For example, might Schedule 7 to the Bill be amended, or regulations under the new Section 78A of the Equality Act be made, to add equal pay provisions for state enforcement, or are there plans for a separate statute in this Parliament? Will she meet me and some of the unions and lawyers who have been working on the problem? Is it finally time for a dream made in Dagenham in 1968 to be fulfilled in Westminster?