The Government has started a consultation on the details of the draft regulations for mandatory gender pay gap reporting that will apply to those employers with 250 employees or more. The key measures are as follows:

• The regulations will come into force on 1 October 2016, but employers will not be expected to publish the required information immediately.
• Employers with 250 or more employees will fall within scope of the regulations; “employee” means someone who ordinarily works in Great Britain and whose contract is governed by UK legislation.
• “Pay” includes basic pay, paid leave, maternity pay, sick pay, area allowances, shift premium pay, bonus pay and other pay (including car allowances paid through the payroll, on call and standby allowances, clothing, first aider or fire warden allowances).
• “Pay” does not include overtime pay, expenses, the value of salary sacrifice schemes, benefits in kind, redundancy pay, arrears of pay and tax credits.
• Employers will have 18 months after commencement to publish the required information for the first time and must then publish annually thereafter.
• Employers will be required to publish their overall mean and median gender pay gaps, arrived at by calculations using data from a specific pay period every April from 2017. Regs 4 and 5 set out the method of calculation.
• To generate average earnings figures unaffected by the number of hours worked, employers will need to calculate an hourly pay rate for each relevant employee.
• Employers will need to publish the difference between the mean bonus payments paid to men and women and show the proportion of male and female employees that received a bonus.
• Employers will be required to report on the number of men and women in each quartile of their pay distribution, i.e. an ordered data set split into four equal groups, where each group contains a quarter of the data. Employers will calculate their own salary quartiles based on their overall pay range.
• A written statement confirming that the information is accurate must accompany the required information.
• Employers must publish the information in English on their searchable UK website that is accessible to employees and the public and retain this information online for three years in order to show the progress made. In addition, employers must upload the information to a Government sponsored website.

The document confirms that supporting guidance to help employers implement the regulations will be published this year. It also confirms that mandatory reporting will be extended to the public sector, and consultation with relevant bodies will take place shortly to ascertain how those requirements will work in practice.

On top of these measures, Nicky Morgan, Women and Equalities Minister, has announced that the Government will recognise those employers making progress to close the gap and those that aren’t, by publishing a league table of the pay gap by sector. The first official publication is set to be in 2018.

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