Act now on pay

The introduction of compulsory gender pay gap reporting, where companies will be required to calculate and publish their gender pay gap, aims to make sure that the talents of women and men are rewarded equally and fairly in every workplace.

Draft regulations have just been published and housing associations really need to start getting organised to comply with the new regime.

The regulations require each employer to publish information based upon a “snapshot of pay” at 30 April 2017, to be repeated annually for 30 April each year. However, employers have 12 months’ grace to publish their figures, so first reports must be published by 30 April 2018.

You will be required to publish on your website figures which show gender pay difference as a percentage of the average female employee’s pay. There will be two such figures. One must show the difference in mean pay between male and female employees (that’s the average of the total of all employees’ pay), and the other the difference in median pay (that is putting all your male/female employees in a line and identifying the pay of the person in the middle). This will include most usual pay, but does not include overtime or benefits in kind.

You must also publish numbers of male and female employees in each of the four quartiles of your overall pay range.  

You do not need to explain any gender pay gap in your organisation, but in practice you may want to provide some additional commentary to contextualise any differences.

It currently appears that all housing associations with 250 employees will be subject to the regulations.

Smaller organisations and public sector bodies can of course publish the information if they wish to. Tenders, contracts and other procurement arrangements may start to require such information to be provided irrespective of the size of employer.

Employers who don’t publish will be “named and shamed”. There will be no sanction if a big pay gap is identified, but subsequent adverse publicity may be an issue.

Published evidence of pay inequalities may also be used to support grievances or claims against you. Many arm’s-length management organisations have already had to grapple with equal pay issues but there is increasing focus on the potential for equal pay claims in the private sector also.

For many organisations, collating this information may be time-consuming and difficult. Take action now to ensure that you are ready to capture pay data on 30 April 2017.

Stuart Jones, head of employment, pensions and immigration, law firm Weightmans