Question

To ask the Minister for Women and Equalities, pursuant to the Answer of 23 May 2022 to Question 3616 on Vacancies: advertising, for what reason historic pay decisions can be a barrier to employers listing salary information on all job adverts.

In March the Equality Hub called on employers to include salary information in all job adverts and stop asking about previous salary during recruitment as part of a new drive on pay transparency. We additionally announced a pilot study to build the evidence on the impact of taking these steps. In order to ensure the results from the pilot are robust, we will be running it as a controlled trial; with specific employers recruited to take part, once the details of the trial have been decided.

The pay setting processes of employers vary widely, and are likely to have changed over the lifetime of the organisations. Many are unlikely to have established a fair and robust pay and reward process from the outset, or performed a job evaluation study. This in turn produces the conditions where unintentional pay disparities may open up. For this reason, for many organisations, moving immediately to a system of full pay transparency is likely to require a period of adjustment. That is why we also announced that we will work with employers to develop a methodology to support them to adopt these measures.