Ethnicity Pay Gap Reporting

Baroness Blake of Leeds Excerpts
Monday 25th October 2021

(2 years, 5 months ago)

Lords Chamber
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Baroness Blake of Leeds Portrait Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
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My Lords, I join other Members in congratulating my noble friend Lord Boateng on his well-informed and incredibly powerful contribution. I thank him for giving us all the opportunity to make such important contributions; I think we have all learned an incredible amount from the speeches that we have heard thus far. I thank my noble friend Lord Sikka for his. I am sure I am not alone in looking forward to the Minister’s response to his request to answers for his six-point plan.

Only last month it was reported that just 13 of the FTSE 100 companies report their ethnicity pay gap. The lesson learned from gender pay gap reporting, as we have heard, is that until it is mandatory it will not become commonplace. While the ethnicity pay gap is usually considered to be around 2% to 3%, if we delve further we find that there are much wider differences between groups. As we have heard, there are many complex reasons for that. We know that, unfortunately, until mandatory reporting is introduced, we will never have a full picture and full understanding of exactly what is happening, but shamefully, even now, we can recognise the gap in pay between many different ethnic groups, as the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, so eloquently laid before us. We need better data but most of all we need action.

My noble friend Lord Boateng has rightly made the case for mandatory reporting. He is in good company: the CBI, the TUC—as we heard from my noble friend Lady Blower—and the Equality and Human Rights Commission have all declared their support, which is a very powerful coming together of different views. There can be no excuse for the Government’s delay: it is now time for the introduction of these new requirements. But they must go further than just mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting. We also need to close the gap with a new requirement on employers to report and eliminate pay gaps. This can begin with the implementation of action plans to eradicate inequalities in the workplace, and must form a part of a wider strategy to end the poverty wages and insecure work that blight millions of lives and are holding back our economy. We have heard in the debate about the disproportionate impact of the Covid pandemic on ethnic minorities. We also know about the impact of poverty on children in our communities; I have said before that we know that a quarter of children under the age of 16 living in Leeds are deemed to be living in poverty, and 75% of those are living in working households. What do we actually know about the disproportionate impact on children from ethnic minorities affected by this?

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol has very carefully talked about the work on the gender pay gap, and we heard from the LSE earlier this year that, since the legislation came in in 2017, there has been progress—but all of us know just how much work there is to do. Unfortunately, we have in front of us a real sense that the Government are dragging their feet on this issue, despite the well-documented public concern and the fact that good practice is evidenced in many of the workplaces that are doing good work in this area. Practical issues are raised as objections. We need to make sure that the Government issue guidance. I finish by asking the Minister: are the Government on our side and prepared to take the next steps in making ethnicity pay gap reporting mandatory?