Gloria De Piero

In 2014 the Government commissioned an extensive research project into perceived pregnancy and maternity discrimination in Great Britain. The research was jointly managed and funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, supported by the Government Equalities Office.

This is the largest ever study of pregnancy and maternity-related discrimination conducted in Great Britain. Interim findings were published in July 2015 and can be found at: http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/publication/pregnancy-and-maternity-related-discrimination-and-disadvantage-first-findings-surveys-employers-and-0.

Final results, including how experiences vary by employer size, are due to be published later this year. These figures represent a one-year period. We do not have results spanning the last five years.

The results of the final report will inform any potential Government action.

Estimates of average energy bills by region can be derived from data in tables 2.2.4 and 2.3.4 of DECC’s publication Quarterly Energy Prices (QEP) https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/annual-domestic-energy-price-statistics .

Estimates for Ashfield constituency are not available but the table below shows the average annual bill per household for the East Midlands from 2010. These estimates are based on the combined average standard electricity and gas annual bills based on fixed consumptions of 3,800kWh/year for electricity and 15,000 kWh/year for gas. The bills provided are averaged across all methods of payment and expressed in cash terms.

As set out in the 2014 Prices and Bills report^[1] increases in wholesale energy costs, which make up around half of a household energy bill, have been the biggest factor behind rising energy bills over recent years.

We are supporting consumers by taking measures to increase competition in the market, make it quicker and easier to switch and by providing support for vulnerable consumers. Changes to social and environmental levies and a government-funded rebate, also cut £50 off the average household energy bill in 2014.

[1] Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/estimated-impacts-of-energy-and-climate-change-policies-on-energy-prices-and-bills-2014

Statistics showing the number of English domiciled applicants awarded Maintenance Grants for study at UK providers are published annually by the Student Loans Company (SLC) in the Statistical First Release ‘Student Support for Higher Education in England’.

http://www.slc.co.uk/official-statistics/full-catalogue-of-official-statistics/student-support-for-higher-education-in-england.aspx

The distribution of maintenance support grants awarded to English applicants at UK providers over the last ten years has been provided in the attached table. Complete data for the academic year 2014/15 will be published by the SLC in November 2015.

The £730 million Growing Places Fund (GPF) was distributed to Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEP) in England as a one-off payment. The payments were made in February and March 2012 under a section 31 grant. Details of the proportion of the fund paid out to each LEP is available on the Department for Communities and Local Government website.

Enterprise Zones do not receive an annual funding allocation. Firms moving onto Enterprise Zones receive business rates discounts. Increases in business rates payments to local authorities from the zone are retained locally and spent to support local economic growth initiatives.

Details about awards made to date are available on the GOV.UK website. Arrangements for future awards will be announced in due course.

We do not hold the data in the format requested; the projects by constituency, the amount committed and paid can be found in the attached table.

Local Enterprise Partnerships are leveraging investment from a wide range of sources alongside funding from government. This includes significant private sector investment. The government’s investments in LEP areas over the last five years have included £2 billion Local Growth Fund, £730 million Growing Places Fund, £440 million Regional Growth Fund, £120 million in Enterprise Zones, and £90.7 million Coastal Communities Fund.

The government does not collect information about all investments secured by LEPs. As bottom-up, self-defined and voluntary partnerships LEPs have autonomy to manage their own resources and so drive economic growth in their local areas without burdensome reporting requirements or restrictive central controls.

It has never been a legal requirement in England to produce an equality impact assessment (EIA). The public sector equality duty and its supporting regulations require public bodies to have due regard to equality considerations when shaping policy and services, but it is up to individual public bodies to decide the best way to record how they have taken equality into account. The independent Steering Group which conducted a review of the PSED and reported in 2013 reported that some public bodies found EIAs helpful and that when carried out well they could highlight examples of good practice.

Detailed data on the age of household occupants is not available at the sub-regional level.

The table below shows the number of fuel poor households which contain at least one child under the age of 16 in (a) England and (b) East Midlands, in each year since 2010.

Number and proportion of fuel poor households with at least one child under 16

Table 1 shows the number of learners aged 24+ participating in further education courses at Level 3 or above from 2009/10 to 2013/14.

Table 1: FE and Skills participation at Level 3+ and ages 24+, 2009/10 to 2013/14

Notes:
1) The source is the Individualised Learner Record.
2) This tables includes Apprenticeships, Workplace Learning, Community Learning and Education and Training provision (including the Offenders’ Learning and Skills Service) taken at General Further Education Colleges (including Tertiary), Sixth Form Colleges, Special Colleges (Agricultural and Horticultural Colleges and Art and Design Colleges), Specialist Colleges and External Institutions.
3) Volumes are rounded to the nearest hundred.
4) Age and gender are based upon self-declaration by the learner.

We do not hold information on the number of employees that have applied for Shared Parental Leave. We will evaluate Shared Parental Leave and Pay by 2018 when the new entitlements have had time to bed in.

The Government will deliver its manifesto commitment to require companies with at least 250 employees to publish gender pay information at the earliest opportunity. A consultation will be published in the Summer with a view to making regulations in early 2016.

In the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the average hourly rate of pay for White or White British employees is £23.53. For BIS employees that are Black, Asian or other minority ethnic groups (including mixed race), the hourly rate is £20.07.

Please note that the above figures reflect the different levels of seniority of the employees that have provided their ethnicity information. This information is declared on a voluntary basis.

Civil servants, in the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC), are based either in London or Scotland and its annual salary ranges are calculated on that basis. The number of hours worked by civil servants in each location varies as new civil service conditions of service are introduced. Therefore an hourly pay rate is not possible to calculate without incurring disproportionate costs. The annual salary rates for each pay grade in London and Scotland, by ethnic group, is shown in the tables below.

Ethnicity - White

Ethnicity – Black, Asian or other minority

The average annual salaries of (a) Faststreamers and SCS PB1 based in London who have identified their ethnicity as Black, Asian or other minority ethnic group, (b) SCS PB3 based in London who have identified their ethnicity as White or White British and (c) Grade 6 and SCS PB1 based in Scotland who have identified their ethnicity as White or White British, have not been disclosed as the numbers in each grouping is less than 5 and could lead to the identification of individuals (see *).

The annual salary of the Permanent Secretary is shown as a salary band as disclosed in the Annual Resource Account.

A total of 1,133 civil servants working in the department have identified their ethnic status. A further 432 have not identified an ethnicity status. The average salaries shown above are based solely on those who have identified their ethnic group.

Table 1 gives the proportion of staff in each ethnic group in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. These proportions are statistical estimates derived from the 2014 Civil Service People Survey.

Table 1: Ethnicity of staff in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

Source: Civil Service People Survey 2014

As at 28 February 2015, the number and proportion of civil servants working for Department of Energy & Climate Change had made diversity declarations as set out below:

(a) White or White British – 971 (62%);

(b) Asian or Asian British – 80 (5%);

(c) Black or Black British – 47 (3%);

(d) Mixed or multiple ethnic group – 28 (2%);

(e) Another ethnicity – less than 10 (less than 1%);

(f) People who prefer not to say or have made no declaration – 432 (27%).

As the requested table is large, I have attached a document detailing the number of apprenticeship applications made through the apprenticeship vacancy online system by ethnicity and Sector Subject Area for the 16-24 age group.

The table shows the number of applications made, not the number of individuals who have applied. An individual can make multiple applications.

Sector Subject Area breakdowns have been provided as information specific to the employment sector is not collected. Additionally, information on applications by the industry sector of the employer is available online:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/fe-data-library-apprenticeship-vacancies

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/400304/SECTOR_SUBJECT_AREAFeb15.xls

The attached tables give the number of contacts with people aged 18 to 24 who have accessed the face to face and adult telephone helpline of the National Careers Service over the past 3 years. As this is a record of contacts, if young people have accessed either service multiple times they will have been counted more than once. We are unable to provide a breakdown into gender for the young people’s helpline.

As the requested table is large, I have attached a document detailing the number of apprenticeship starts for the under 25 age group by ethnicity and sector subject area.

As the requested table is large, I have attached an additional document detailing apprenticeship starts for those aged under 25 by gender and sector subject area.

Equality is at the heart of all policy and decision making by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

To help comply with the Equality Act 2010, analysis conducted of the impact on equality of its key policies and decisions are regularly published by the department and available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications?commit=Refresh+results&departments%5B%5D=department-for-business-innovation-skills&from_date=&keywords=&official_document_status=all&page=2&publication_filter_option=impact-assessments&to_date=&topics%5B%5D=all&world_locations%5B%5D=all.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills operates a flexible working policy that enables employees to work flexibly wherever possible and where this meets the needs of the business. We have been offering our employees the opportunity to work flexibly since April 2012.

Decisions on how this operates for an individual employee, and consideration of statutory applications to request flexible working, are managed by line managers at a local level.

We do not hold central records on this and there would therefore be a disproportionate cost incurred in collecting this information from our line managers.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change does not hold centrally the records of individual requests for flexible working. To identify the number of applications would involve contacting every line manager within the department and would incur disproportionate costs.

The data is not held in the format requested. A breakdown of Regional Growth Fund committed and paid in each constituency to date for projects only is provided. The amount paid by programmes which have regional or nationwide coverage is included for completeness. Where there is a difference in the amount committed and the amount paid this reflects the payment schedules agreed with each beneficiary. Figures are rounded to the nearest £10,000 and are correct as at the 1 December.

* A drawdown schedule is agreed with each organisation when they sign their grant offer letter but matches the beneficiary’s own investment schedule. For the recently contracted Round 5 awards, payments are scheduled through to March 2017.

The Government Equalities Office made the following public appointments to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in each of the last five years:

* includes two reappointments

The EHRC Chair and Deputy Chair posts are salaried and the salaries over the period are shown below. The significant reduction in the remuneration is a result of the reduction in terms and conditions following the Government’s comprehensive review of the EHRC:

Commissioners receive £400 a day plus expenses. In addition, two male Disability Commissioners were required to carry out additional work during the period, therefore additional payments were made as shown:

The total of fees and expenses paid each year to each Commissioner is available in the relevant EHRC annual report and accounts.

Information on students awarded and paid Disabled Students’ Allowance is published annually by Student Loans Company (SLC) ’. The latest statistics are available at the following link:

http://www.slc.co.uk/media/694170/slcsfr052013.pdf

The number of students who received disabled students’ allowance in each parliamentary constituency in the East Midlands in each of the last three years is provided in the table. Comparable data for earlier years is not readily available.

Public appointments made by the Government Equalities Office in the last five years have been to the Equality and Human Rights Commission:

For the last five years EHRC Commissioners have received fees at a rate of £400 per day (except for the Chair and Deputy Chair who are salaried). Commissioners also receive expenses for travel and subsistence in the course of their EHRC duties. Payments made vary considerably depending on each Commissioner’s role and the amount of time that each contributes. The table shows the range of remuneration paid to Commissioners during the period:

The Government Equalities Office has not been serviced by any sub-contracted staff over the last five years.

Recent data for years since the tuition fee reforms and access agreements is not yet available, but the latest data from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) shows that entry rates to higher education for all ethnic groups in 2013 had increased and overall, there was a much higher representation of black and minority ethnic groups in university than in the overall population of England.

The table below shows the figures before these changes.

Estimated percentage of maintained school pupils aged 15 in each ethnic group who progressed to Oxford, Cambridge or Russell Group institutions by age 19

Source: Matched data from the DfE National Pupil Database, the HESA Student Record and the SFA ILR

Figures are not available for earlier age cohorts.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency collects and publishes data on leavers from UK Higher Education Institutions. Statistics on the proportion of full-time first degree leavers from each ethnic group who were working, studying and unemployed six months after graduation can be found in the table. Employment has risen and unemployment has fallen for graduates of all ethnic groups in 2011/12 and 2012/13.

Information on leavers at UK Higher Education Institutions in the academic year 2013/14 will become available from Higher Education Statistics Agency in June 2015.

However the most recent Labour Force Survey from August 2014 confirms that employment for recent graduates has continued to rise sharply and unemployment continued to fall over the last year.

Destination of UK domiciled ⁽¹⁾ full-time first degree leavers six months after graduation

UK Higher Education Institutions

Academic Year 2010/11⁽²⁾ to 2012/13

Work

Work and further study

Further study

Unemployed

Other (e.g. taking time out to travel)

Source: Destination of Leavers in Higher Education in the UK

Notes:

1. Domicile refers to the student’s postcode or permanent address prior to entering their course.

2. The way employment activity was recorded changed in 2011/12 therefore figures for 2010/11 are not on the same basis as 2011/12 and 2012/13

3. Percentages have been rounded, therefore the sum of components may not add up to the total.

Information on the number of apprenticeship starts by parliamentary constituency is published in a supplementary table to a Statistical First Release (SFR):

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/324021/apprenticeships-starts-by-geography-learner-demographics-and-sector-subject-area.xls

The Government Equalities Office has not met hate crime prevention groups specifically, but meets regularly with stakeholders – such as Stonewall, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, and the Lesbian and Gay Foundation – to discuss a broad range of issues including hate crime. In addition, Government Equalities Office officials attend the Hate Crime Strategy Board, a cross-Government working group led by the Home Office and Ministry of Justice which considers policy and service improvements to prevent and reduce all forms of hate crime, and improve the criminal justice system’s response to such incidents.

The Government Equalities Office has not spent any money on plants, televisions or artwork over the past 5 years.

The available information is in the table.

Expenditure on Catering and Refreshments

Notes:

1. GEO’s transfers between Departments mean that the data is only accessible through a number of different legacy systems. Further detail could only be provided at disproportionate cost.

2. Expenditure on wine is included in the figures above; it is not recorded separately.

The Government Equalities Office has not spent any money on plants, televisions or artwork over the past 5 years.

The available information is in the table.

Expenditure on Catering and Refreshments

Notes:

1. GEO’s transfers between Departments mean that the data is only accessible through a number of different legacy systems. Further detail could only be provided at disproportionate cost.

2. Expenditure on wine is included in the figures above; it is not recorded separately.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is an independent body and is responsible for its own staff management, including non-permanent staff salaries. I have therefore asked the Chief Executive of the Commission to write to the honourable member with the information requested.

The Department publishes the number of measures that have been installed in each parliamentary constituency through the Affordable Warmth obligation of the Energy Company Obligation in Table 1.11b of its quarterly Official Statistics release:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/green-deal-energy-company-obligation-eco-and-insulation-levels-in-great-britain-quarterly-report-to-march-2014.

Affordable Warmth figures include heating measures such as new boilers, as well as insulation.

Additional low income households are likely to be among the beneficiaries of the 518 insulation measures delivered in Ashfield in the same period under aspects of the Energy Company Obligation other than Affordable Warmth, but this figure cannot be broken down by income.

Figures for Warm Front are published on the Government website, and show that there were 884 households helped in 2009/10, 380 helped in 2010/11, 90 helped in 2011/12 and 106 helped in 2012/13 in the Ashfield constituency:

https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/helping-households-to-cut-their-energy-bills/supporting-pages/warm-front-scheme

Figures for the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target and Community Energy Savings Programme are not available at constituency level.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is an independent body and is responsible for its own staff management, including staff salaries. I have therefore asked the Chief Executive of the Commission to write to the honourable member with the information requested.

The Government's Women and the Economy action plan sets out a clear programme of work to maximise women's contribution to economic growth and address the gender pay gap. I have oversight of this, as well as being the minister responsible for key elements of it, such as extending flexible working, introducing shared parental leave, and increasing the number of women on company boards. I regularly meet with ministerial colleagues and others to discuss these issues, and the Ministers for Women gave a joint presentation to Cabinet in April on these issues.

The Government Equalities Office (GEO) embraces flexible working. All posts are advertised on a flexible basis and GEO employees have always had the opportunity to request temporary or permanent changes to their working patterns at any time. This approach significantly reduces the need for GEO employees to make a statutory application for flexible working and we have no record of any such request having been made.

The Department does not have projections for the numbers of households with and without insulation by constituency.

A register of renewable projects in the planning system is maintained in the publicly-accessible Renewable Energy Planning Database (REPD); it records projects by district rather than by constituency. The wind turbines planned for development in Nottinghamshire, by district, as recorded in REPD in May 2014, is as follows:

The information is shown in the table.

Percentage of accepted applicants to full-time undergraduate courses in the UK who were female, for selected subjects, 2009 to 2013

Source: UCAS annual pivot tables.

The Government Equalities Office (GEO) embraces flexible working. All posts are advertised on a flexible basis and GEO employees have always had the opportunity to request temporary or permanent changes to their working patterns at any time. This approach significantly reduces the need for GEO employees to make a statutory application for flexible working and we have no record of any such request having been made.