Today the Equality Bill was announced which aims to ‘make Britain stronger, fairer and more equal’. Among the new laws is a requirement for businesses to report on gender pay, encourage positive discrimination in the workplace to increase diversity and tackle age discrimination.
Expecting the new laws to come into effect in late 2010, Harriet Harman, Minister for Women and Equality, said: “The Equality Bill is part of building a strong fair future for Britain out of the downturn. That means fairness and opportunity. Especially in tougher economic times, we need to face the problems fairly and we need to look for a fairer future.”
The Employer’s Forum on Disability (EFD) largely welcomed the Bill, but added that it is vital public sector organisations understand why disability discrimination is different from other forms of discrimination. The EFD claimed it is unlikely employers will ever know how many disabled people are actually working for them as people do not always declare their disability, hence need for a different monitoring system. EFD is calling for the Equalities Bill to require large employers to monitor how many and what kind of adjustments they make for disabled staff. The forum claims this method will be much more effective than forcing employers to publish ‘statistics which don’t tell the full story’. However, the EFD is calling for the government to go further for equality by eliminating ‘e-discrimination’, such as inaccessible online recruitment.
Other facets of the Equality Bill likely to affect business include changes in public procurement – the government will increase the part that equality issues play in public procurement, while companies with more than 250 staff will be required to report on their gender pay gap. The standard for reporting will be agreed with the Equality and Human Rights Commission and reporting will not become compulsory until 2013, but then only if sufficient progress has not been made through voluntary reporting.
Public sector organisations will have greater reporting duties, covering rates of ethnic minority employment and disability employment rates, and that gagging clauses, preventing employees from discussing their pay, will be banned. Also included is a change to tribunals, meaning they will be able to make recommendations in discrimination claims that will benefit the whole workforce, rather than the individual claimant. A failure to comply with a recommendation could be used as evidence in a future discrimination claim. The impact of Malcolm v Lewisham Borough Council is to be reversed.
Richard Martin, partner, Speechly Bircham, said: “This has been coming for a long time. The pay gap between men and women is still very large and insufficient progress is being made to close it. The growing view within government and elsewhere is that the only way to make progress is to increase openness. The requirement will add a degree of reporting burden on employers but in reality the administrative burden will be small given that it is likely to be simply a question of averaging pay across the genders.”
He added: “The real difficulty lies in what the data will show and employers feeling the need to explain and put some context around data which in all probability will make for worrying reading in many cases.”
It seems the real impact will be within organisations as inequality is uncovered – giving organisations a reason to put right inequality in their organisation before reporting comes in.
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