Equal Pay Claims

With remuneration, pay, benefits and cost of living at the forefront of everyone’s mind going into your 2024-2025 budget setting, it is important that organisations do not lose sight of the Gender Pay Gap.

You may have heard on the news this week that Birmingham City Council effectively declared bankruptcy due (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-birmingham-66717957) largely due to up-to £1.8bn in equal pay claims (£1.1bn settled and estimated upto £760m to settle outstanding claims). 

The latest statistics show that in April 2022 the median hourly pay gap between men and women with full time salaries was 8.3%.

This doesn’t tell us the full story, as a larger proportion of women work part time hours, leading to the true overall median pay gap of 14.9%.

We have been working with lots of new and existing clients on their Gender Pay Gap audits to ensure they are not leaving their businesses open to the risk of equal pay claims.

We discovered that a lot of businesses felt they were covered by their job evaluation process alone; however there were still major gaps in the gender pay across many grades.

Can you risk / afford leaving your company open to a claim?

Why does this matter to your business?

As you know, private companies and voluntary organisations, with over 250 employees, are required to reveal the number of men and women in each pay range to highlight where pay gaps are at their widest.

Many companies felt their internal pay systems and job evaluation schemes would provide them with a robust enough system to protect them from any claims.  However, you only need to read the newspapers to see that even big Corporates such as Asda and Sainsburys, who had job evaluation and pay structures in place, faced big claims through the court tribunal system.

It is vitally important that you review any variances that you have in your organisation and create a plan of action to correct the disparity in pay. By not addressing potential gender pay gaps within your business, you risk losing top quality staff whilst not being able to attract top quality talent to your organisation, creating wider retention issues. You could also end up with a legal problem if men and women are paid differently for doing equal work under the equality act 2010.

We can help by reviewing your roles and pay, and offer a wide range of the services including Job Evaluation, Salary Benchmarking and Pay Frameworks. Utilising these tools correctly can reduce risk and address any gender pay gap you may have.

We’re here to support you and your organisation both now and in the long term. To find out more contact us