GENDER PAY REPORTING
Background
JULY 2015 So many questions were raised throughout the consultation period which began with the publication of Closing the Gender Pay Gap which launched the consultation from the Government Equalities Office (GEO) on 14 July 2015. The CIPP held two roundtable meetings together with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and promoted a survey to members of both Professional Bodies to ensure that views and concerns were gathered together with the constructive contributions from members who had experience of reporting the Gender Pay Gap through the voluntary initiative Think, Act, Report . This voluntary initiative had seen almost 300 employers sign up to create a ‘community of best practice’ which collectively employed over 2 million people however, and as was confirmed in February 2016 when the Government published their response to the consultation, “We said we would keep section 78 of the Equality Act 2010 under review and that is what we have done. As only seven signatories voluntarily published their gender pay gap, the government now wants to build on the progress made through the voluntary approach.” The response to the 2015 consultation saw the publication of a second consultation on the draft regulations that would be needed to deliver this mandation. It was issued on 12 February 2016 and ran until midnight on 11 March 2016. At this point consultation centred around The Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017 – which obliged employers within the private and voluntary sector with 250 employees as at the snapshot date of 30 April (later changed to 5 April) in any given year to begin reporting their Gender Pay Gap before 4 April 2018. It was estimated that
approximately 8,000 employers employing a total of 11 million employees would be affected by these regulations . FEBRUARY 2016 A roundtable meeting of external stakeholders representing the payroll industry was held together with representatives of GEO and an indicative subsequent timetable was shared that planned for: l the regulations to be laid by the summer of 2016 l the parliamentary process beginning in July of the same year l October 2016 being the earliest possible date the regulations would commence. This news was indeed pleasing to software developers as the need for a workable timetable had been one of the areas of concern during discussions held in July 2015 consultation as automation and technology have always been seen as an important asset to deliver gender pay gap reporting successfully. 23 JUNE 2016 On 23 June 2016 a referendum was held that saw the UK vote to end its membership of the European Union. gender pay gap reporting was among the casualties that experienced delay in their planned policy delivery as the UK Parliament responded to the outcome of the referendum. PUBLIC SECTOR EMPLOYERS – AUGUST 2016 Mandatory Gender Pay Reporting – Public Sector Employers was published on the 18 August 2016 and confirmed that as significant progress had been made towards introducing mandatory gender pay gap reporting for large private and voluntary sector employers the government believed “that it is only right that public sector employers should lead the way in promoting gender equality in the workplace.”
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THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF PAYROLL PROFESSIONALS
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