Clause 73
Equality Bill
12:15 pm
John Penrose (Shadow Minister, Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform; Weston-Super-Mare, Conservative)
I intend to address both kinds of discrimination when we get the clause stand part debate.
The Minister said that such measures take companies by surprise because they discover things they did not know. How can she square that with the calculation of the implementation costs in the Government’s impact assessment:
“We have assumed that the salary/wage data needed to calculate and publish the companies’ gender pay gaps are already collected and available at least for businesses with 250 or more employees who are companies under the Companies Act 2006. We have also assumed data identifying each employee’s gender will be held”?
The Government have assumed that all the necessary data to create a gender pay audit is already held in a readily accessible, easily identifiable form in a company, but she has just implied that companies do not know what is going on because data are not held in a convenient form and that the companies have not been able to see them. Either they are held in a convenient form or they are not. If they are not, the impact assessment will have overestimated the number of businesses that have the data.