From 6 April 2017 all private sector employers who employ 250 or more employees will be legally obliged to publish an annual report setting out the ‘Gender Pay Gap’ within their business.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the draft regulations which set out employers’ reporting obligations are extremely detailed and complex and it is clear that employers are going to have to plan ahead in order to gather all of the relevant statistics and publish them in time.

There are six statistics which employers will have to publish in their report for each reporting year:

Mean gender pay gap.

1. Median gender pay gap.
2. Mean bonus gender pay gap.
3. Median bonus gender pay gap.
4. Proportions of male and female employees who received a bonus.
5. Proportions of male and female employees in each of four pay quartiles.

The information required in order to calculate these statistics is unlikely to be available at the touch of a button on existing payroll systems and employers are going to have to spend some considerable time extracting the details which they need before they can even begin to carry out the relevant calculations.  To add to the complexity, it is possible that casual workers and some self-employed consultants could count as ‘employees’ for the purposes of these calculations and employers who have staff engaged on a variety of working patterns, perhaps  part-time or irregular hours, will have additional work to do in order to produce the statistics required.

The first reports must be published by 4 April 2018 and subsequent reports must them be produced on an annual basis.

To help employers navigate their way through the calculations which they need to complete, we have produced this detailed Employer’s Guide.

For further information, please contact Matt Jenkin on 01628  470011 or matt.jenkin@moorcrofts.com or Sally Nesbitt on 01628 470014 or sally.nesbitt@moorcrofts.com