Agenda item

This report presents information on the Gender Pay Gap.

Discussion:

The Head of Council Planning and Programmes introduced the report which provided sight of the Council’s results for this reporting year ahead of publication on the Council’s public website by 31 March 2024 and on the Government dedicated Gender pay gap reporting website.  It was noted that the Council does not have a specific duty to publish data on an ethnicity or disability pay gap, but this data is also provided in this report.

It was noted that an updated replacement Appendix 5 – Diversity Impact Assessment had been previously circulated earlier that day.

Median Gender Pay Gap in hourly rate of pay: Members sought clarification of the figures set out at paragraph 4.11 of the report. The Head of Council Planning and Programmes advised that the increase in the median Gender Pay Gap in hourly rate of pay had been caused by an increase of only 8 males within the reporting year. This was potentially due to them being recruited at the higher quartile, but she would check this and report back to the Committee.

Recruitment: It was queried how the lower number of females in higher management roles was being addressed and five-year trend data analysis of this was requested in order to be able to track whether there had been improvement at this level.The Head of Council Planning and Programmes advised that an action plan had not yet been developed.It was noted that males were more likely to negotiate salaries and the introduction of the MedPay Performance, Progression & Pay (PPP) Policy and three set points would go some way to eliminate this potential reason for disparity. At the moment there was not the available resources to further interrogate the data or build an action plan, however the data of the last five years was available and could be presented within in the next report as requested.

It was noted that there was potentially a higher proportion of female colleagues due to the family friendly policies, but there was no definitive answer.

Bonus pay: With regards to why there were higher numbers of minority ethnic employees receiving bonus pay, the Head of Council Planning and Programmes advised that she could not answer that and would take that away and report back. The Chief Organisational Culture Officer suggested that it could be due to retention payments and higher ethnicity rates within the People Directorate, but this assumption would need to be tested.

Disability Gap: The Chief Organisational Culture Officeradvised that a workshop in March would start looking at a campaign on building employees’ trust to disclose any disabilities, as the declaration rate was not as high as it should be and therefore not a completely accurate picture. Progress would be shared at a future meeting.

Members noted the Joint Consultative Committee comments from the earlier meeting.

Decision:

a)            The Committee noted the contents of the report in relation to the Gender Pay Gap as detailed in Appendix 1 to the report, prior to external publication.

b)            The Committee noted the ethnicity and disability pay gap results as set out in Appendices 3 and 4 to the report. 

c)            The Committee requested comparative five-year data in future reports, to enable trend analysis of upper quartile female recruitment.