Draft Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties and public authorities) regulations 2017

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd February 2017 General Committees

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall. I believe and welcome what the Minister has said but, frankly, taking eight years after the Equality Act 2010 does not seem a very convincing commitment to equal pay.

When we look at what these regulations do not include, we see that there will be real gaps. For example, regulation 2(3) states that

“an employee of an English local authority at a maintained school is to be treated as an employee of the governing body of that school.”

That means I can think of no primary school, except perhaps the enormous one in my constituency, that will be affected by these measures. Primary school teachers, who can be real victims of pay inequality, and the dinner ladies in such schools, who can be even greater victims of pay inequality, will not be able to compare their pay to that of men. There are real issues about scope and coverage and about the time that women have had to wait. We get very used to waiting for equality —some of us have got old waiting for equality—and that is a further issue I am concerned about.

There is a bit of the Equality Act that this Government and their predecessors did not commence: the provision that means where age discrimination and gender discrimination cross, the power to contest that combined discrimination should be available to women. When it comes to pay, where is the biggest pay gap? It is the one for older women. Women reach peak pay at 39, whereas men reach it in their late 50s. Frankly, it is not right, and this pay audit is not likely to highlight that issue sufficiently. I am deeply concerned that we are still stuck with legislation that was perhaps right for eight years ago but is now out of date and we are just getting it implemented now. That is a very serious question.

I have one more question, about the meaning of “employment” in regulation 2. The biggest pay gap, as well as by age, is between people who are employed in the gig economy—on flexible, precarious contracts—and those who are on secure contracts. Public authorities use those precarious contracts less than private companies, but they do use them. I do not know, looking at the regulations, how someone on that kind of precarious contract could use the information that will be made public to secure a fairer pay deal for themselves. That is another example of where taking eight years to do something that would have been right eight years ago means that the regulations have become out of date.

Although I welcome the fact that we are at last seeing these regulations, they are nearly a decade out of date. I urge the Minister to look at what she will do about the question of age pay inequality and what she will do to tackle the pay inequality that is so gross in those precarious jobs in the gig economy.