Wednesday 22nd November was Equal Pay Day, when women effectively stopped earning compared to their male counterparts due to the pay gap between men and women. This conveniently fell on the same day as the Autumn Statement, when the Chancellor provides an update on the government’s plans for the economy. Sadly, equal pay went unmentioned.

Labour is proud to be the party that introduced the Equal Pay Act but we can do and need to do much more. We have pledged urgent action to close the pay gap by:

• Modernising equal pay legislation to allow for equal pay comparisons across employers where men and women are carrying out comparable work.
• Enforcing the requirement to report and eliminate pay gaps, with employers required to devise and implement plans to eradicate these inequalities.
• Ensuring outsourced workers are included in employers’ pay gap reporting and pay ratio reporting.
• Introducing mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting for firms with more than 250 staff, to mirror gender pay gap reporting rules.