On 17 March 2022, the Government published ‘Inclusive Britain’, its response to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities Report from 12 months earlier.

The response outlines a number of measures that the Government plans to take over the coming years to address racial inequality in the UK.

I want to focus on one measure the Government has confirmed it will not be taking; they will not be making ethnicity pay gap reporting mandatory. The response confirms this will continue to be voluntary and there are no current plans to enforce mandatory reporting for ethnicity pay gaps in the UK, as are in place for gender pay gaps.

Organisations that choose to publish their figures will be required to publish a ‘diagnosis and action plan’, setting out reasons why disparities exist and what will be done to address them. Guidance on voluntary ethnicity pay gap reporting, to be published by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) in summer 2022, will be designed to help employers address some of the challenges around ethnicity pay gap reporting. It will include case studies drawn from organisations that have already chosen to report on their ethnicity pay, setting a benchmark for what a good action plan might cover.

Some 19 per cent of businesses across the UK took note of their ethnicity pay gap in 2021 and only half of these actually published this data, analysis by Business In The Community (BITC) shows. The alarming headline from an article in The Independent references the BITC's conclusion that, at this rate, without mandatory reporting, it could take another 53 years for ethnicity pay gap reporting to become universal. Clearly, this is not acceptable.

Why has the Government made this decision in the ironically named ‘Inclusive Britain’ publication?

The response states that it may not be the most appropriate tool for every type of employer seeking to ensure fairness in the workplace and that it wants to avoid imposing new reporting burdens on businesses as they recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.

On the first point, the Government has failed to come up with a more appropriate tool to ensure fairness, which does not seem progressive or helpful. On the second point, the consideration of not over-burdening businesses who cannot withstand such red tape is exactly why the exemption applies in gender pay reporting for employers with fewer than 250 employees; we would have expected the same for ethnicity pay gap reporting.

Please see my colleague Alice Kinder's article from 7 March 2022, should pay gap reporting be widened?.

Not only does such reporting aid the recording and improving of diversity, helping to improve society for all, but it clearly facilitates your organisation's EDI strategy moving forward; making you a more inclusive and desirable place to work.

Anthony Collins Solicitors voluntarily publishes its Ethnicity Pay Gap Report, and we implore other organisations to do the same.