Career break returner programmes launched across public sector 30 August 2017
New initiatives have been launched to help people back to work after a career break, to boost skills, and to close the gender pay gap.
The returner programmes – part of the £5 million fund announced in this year’s Budget – are formal schemes offered by employers to provide training and support to people who have taken time out of the workplace. The Government Equalities Office will be establishing four new returner schemes across the public sector.
They will be open to women and men, with the aim of giving people who have taken career breaks the opportunity to refresh their skills and build professional networks.
According to research by PwC, addressing the career break penalty could provide a £1.7 billion boost to our annual economic output. For female professionals, that could increase the annual earnings of that group by an average of £4,000 per woman. Later this year, returners will be able to apply to programmes for social workers, allied health professionals, and civil servants. It is part of the government’s work to support parents and carers returning to work, build home-grown skills, and close the gender pay gap.
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Reform will require listed firms to reveal CEO-to-employee pay ratios 31 August 2017
The government intends to bring legislative reforms into effect by June 2018 which will force all listed companies to reveal the pay ratio between bosses and workers.
Business Secretary Greg Clark has set out the government’s corporate governance reforms to enhance the public's trust in business.
For the first time listed companies will have to publish pay ratios between chief executives and their average UK worker under government reforms to boardroom accountability outlined by Business Secretary Greg Clark. He set out how the government’s package of corporate governance reforms will enhance the transparency of big business to shareholders, employees and the public. These will include the world’s first public register of listed companies where a fifth of investors have objected to executive annual pay packages. This new scheme will be set up in the autumn and overseen by the Investment Association, a trade body that represents UK investment managers. around 900 listed companies to annually publish and justify the pay ratio between CEOs and their average UK worker all companies of a significant size to publicly explain how their directors take employees’ and shareholders’ interests into account all large companies to make their responsible business arrangements public. The Business Secretary will seek to ensure employees’ interests are better represented at board level of listed companies. He will ask the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), which sets high standards of governance through the UK Corporate Governance Code, to introduce a new requirement in the code to achieve this. In the coming months the government will introduce new laws to require:
Under the code’s ‘comply or explain’ basis, firms would have to either:
assign a non-executive director to represent employees create an employee advisory council or nominate a director from the workforce
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