The UK Pay Transparency Regulations: apparent transparency without accountability?

The UK enacted its first legal measure to address gender pay inequity, the Equal Pay Act 1970, more than 50 years ago. While the Gender Pay Gap (GPG) fell by almost 10 percentage points in the twenty years from 1999 (26.9%) to 2019 (17.4%), in 2021, the GPG still stood at 15.4%. Departing from the remedial and individual approach that characterises equal pay legislation, in 2011 the UK Government introduced a voluntary pay reporting initiative called “Think, Act, Report” to entice employers to proactively think about their pay structures from a gender perspective and to report their pay data broken down by gender. The lack of success of that measure led in 2017 to the enactment of the Gender Pay Gap Information Regulations (‘the Regulations’), requiring private and voluntary sector organisations with 250+ employees to annually publish pay data broken down by gender. The long-term aspiration of the Regulations is contributing to close the GPG within a generation but this goal might be far-fetched considering the actual duties introduced: the only legal obligation is reporting information on various basic pay and bonus metrics broken down by gender; no action is required. The Government also hoped that the Regulations would contribute to improve pay transparency through public disclosure and encourage employers to change workplace policies to reduce organisational GPG (immediate aims), and to improve employers’ accountability (underlying aim). This article considers if the Regulations have what it takes to meet those immediate and underlying aims. Our assessment framework is built on the premise that for public disclosure to be useful and for employers to tackle the causes of the GPG, the information reported must be of sufficient quality, meaningful and relevant. On that basis, the article draws on both doctrinal analysis and empirical data reported by select FTSE 100 Index companies to assess the Regulations’ scope and reporting requirements and determine if they hold the potential to meet those aims.