Equal Pay

(asked on 18th October 2022) - View Source

Question

To ask the Minister for Women and Equalities, what practical guidance the Government Equalities Office has prepared for employers to support pay transparency.


Answered by
Katherine Fletcher Portrait
Katherine Fletcher
This question was answered on 21st October 2022

In March, the Equality Hub announced a pilot study to build the evidence on the impact of employers including salary information in all job adverts, and stopping asking about previous salary during recruitment, as part of a new drive on pay transparency. 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. We will make an announcement on the participating employers at a time that will ensure the outcomes of the trials are not influenced by it.

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.

This work, separate to the research pilot, will be supported by the pay transparency working group. This informal group met for the first time in September, and is made up of a mixture of employer bodies, businesses, and HR professionals. In order to facilitate rich discussion among participants, these meetings are held under Chatham House rules. This enables employers to be honest about the barriers they are facing, which will in turn inform a more effective methodology which actually engages with the issues.

Reticulating Splines