Ethnicity pay gap report

This report sets out and explains our ethnicity pay gap figures, as of 5 April 2024.

What is an ethnicity pay gap

It shows the difference in the average hourly rate of pay between PGM (People of the Global Majority) and non-PGM colleagues, expressed as a percentage of the average non-PGM earnings.

We pay spot salaries, and all genders, regardless of their ethnicity, carrying out the same role are paid the same salary and roles are independently market tested.

There are rules around who should be excluded from a gender pay gap report and we are following the same rules for our ethnicity pay gap report. Those excluded include anyone who has been on maternity leave, long term sick or unpaid leave. This will affect the workforce percentages, making them different from other diversity reports we produce.

We have a high ethnicity disclosure rate of 96.1%, based on the parameters of this report, leaving a gap of 3.9% where ethnicity is either ‘unknown’ or ‘prefer not to disclose’. The gap has continued to reduce in recent years.

Over the last two years, we have pro-actively encouraged applications from candidates from PGM backgrounds. This has helped us to improve our ethnicity mix by 1.1% to 14.8% this year. This figure is different to the workforce figure in the bar chart below due to the criteria applied to the pay gap reports.

Our results

Mean (average)

The mean pay gap: the difference in average hourly pay; adding all pay rates together and dividing by the total number of people.

2024 %	2023 %	2022 %	2021 %
2.57	3.84	-2.37	-3.75

This shows a positive pay gap in favour of white colleagues, but this has reduced from last year.

This means that for every £10 the average white colleague earns, the average PGM colleague takes home £9.74.

Median (middle)

The median pay gap: the difference in hourly pay between the middle-paid white employee and middle-paid PGM employee (the person at the mid-point if you were to line all employees up from low to high pay). The median is the most representative measure as it stops a small amount of very high or low salaries skewing the results.

2024 %	2023 %	2022 %	2021 %
-1.33	4.27	-0.45	-3.63

The median gap is -1.33% in favour of PGM colleagues, which is a 5.6% swing from last year.

Pay quartiles

In order to get a true picture for pay quartiles for 100% of those included in this report, detail for the 3.9% data gap has been added into each quartile.

The ethnicity pay quartiles below show that PGM colleagues are again under-represented in the lower middle quartile. They are also slightly under-represented in the upper quartile, however, this is a 2.4% improvement on last year.

Conclusion

• We have recently set ourselves a target of being within 2.5% either way of a zero mean pay gap, and this has nearly been achieved this year.

• Although there is some improvement on last year, we are keen to keep improving on the gap and reduce it to below our target of 2.5%. We will be looking at how we might achieve this with colleagues in our Belonging group.