Ethnicity Pay Gap Reporting

Lord Bishop of Bristol Excerpts

Monday 25th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Bristol]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, for raising this Question for Short Debate.

I know from my experience as the former Dean of York the significant positive impact gender pay gap reporting had on the implementation of inclusion policies in an institution which had previously been overwhelmingly male. Careful attention to the gender pay gap required us to focus continuously on developing opportunities for women, not least in our stoneyard among carpenters and stonemasons, where we achieved parity. We had equal opportunity for girl and boy choristers—but I admit that the back row of the choir presented more of a challenge.

Now in the diocese of Bristol, I am acutely aware of both the imbalance in the number of UKME lay employees and their recruitment to largely junior roles in my organisation—it is totally different from the surrounding population, to my shame. I hope that the Church of England might consider participating in a pilot study in preparation for this policy, as I understand that the law in this area is complex. There are challenges in drafting legislation or guidance and in the collection of data. I note these challenges and offer three suggestions for a way forward.

First, there is currently no legal requirement for companies to collect, share or publish ethnicity pay gap data, but I hope this can be changed. An illustrative precedent here is the 2016 higher education White Paper’s proposals to

“place a duty on institutions to publish application, offer, acceptance and progression rates, broken down by gender, ethnicity and disadvantage”

and to

“legislate to require those organisations who provide shared central admissions services … to share relevant data they hold with Government and researchers in order to help improve policies designed to increase social mobility”.

These proposals were enacted in the subsequent Higher Education and Research Act 2017.

Secondly, GDPR rules require that individual consent must exist to the collection and storage of personal data and its use for statistical analysis and other purposes by named organisations. Employers already collect data relating to other personal characteristics of employees, so it should not be impossible also to collect ethnicity data within the GDPR rules.

Thirdly and finally, where the total number of employees or the number of employees in a particular subcategory—for example, a particular ethnic group—is small, there is a risk that individuals and their personal data could be identified in published statistics. For example, if an employer has just five ethnic-minority employees, public reporting of the ethnic-majority versus ethnic-minority pay gap for this employer could inadvertently reveal the personal pay levels of those five ethnic-minority employees.

There are industry-standard methods of minimising the risk of inadvertently publishing data from which individuals and their personal data can be identified, which typically involve supressing the publication of any statistics relating to fewer than 10 cases. In line with this, provisions could be made to ensure that employers do not publish data relating to subcategories of employees in which there are fewer than 10 cases. However, employers could still be required to collect such data regardless of subcategory size, publish it in a more highly aggregated form so that no subcategory has fewer than 10 cases and share their data with a trusted third party, such as the ONS, which could analyse data provided by all employers and report results in a way that safeguards against disclosure of personal data or identities.

Given these mitigations, I support the requirement for larger enterprises to collect and publish data on the ethnic pay gap to bring about much greater equality of opportunity in the workplace and a greater sense of common humanity.