Gender Pay Gaps

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Wednesday 8th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

Will the Government, in the interests of fairness and equality, make the same demands of employers in relation to ethnicity as they do in relation to gender? There is plenty of evidence to indicate that black and ethnic minority people suffer equally, if not worse, from disparity when it comes to employment pay and prospects.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank the noble Lord very much for raising that. I do not disagree with him that BAME representation, not only in organisations but also on things such as FTSE 100 boards and FTSE 250 boards, is diabolical. We always saw gender pay gap reporting as a start on this journey—which is absolutely not to dismiss the noble Lord’s point that we have an awful lot further to go.