The Department for Communities in Northern Ireland is holding a public consultation on the proposed introduction of a requirement for Northern Ireland employers to report on their gender pay gap.
Background
Employment law is a devolved matter in Northern Ireland so the legislation that took effect across the rest of the UK in 2017, requiring large employers to publish gender pay gap reports on an annual basis, does not apply there.
The Employment Act (Northern Ireland) 2016 provided for the introduction of gender pay gap reporting in Northern Ireland, as well as ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting and the publication of pay gap action plans. However, with no functioning Northern Ireland Assembly for much of the period since 2017, these have not been brought into force.
Consultation
The consultation document explains that the proposed regulations would apply to employers (in the public, private and voluntary sectors) with 250 or more relevant employees. According to June 2024 data, this would capture approximately 345 employers in Northern Ireland. The consultation seeks views on the appropriateness of the 250+ threshold, but acknowledges that a lower threshold may impose a disproportionate financial burden on smaller employers. It could also give rise to confidentiality and data protection issues where individual employees might be identifiable from reported data.
Affected employers would be required to report their:
- Mean and median gender pay gap (based on hourly pay).
- Mean and median gender bonus gap, and percentage of male and female staff who receive a bonus.
- And numbers of male and female employees across their pay quartiles.
Reports would have to be produced annually based on data from a snapshot date of 5 April. These metrics mirror existing gender pay gap reporting requirements in the rest of the UK in order to ensure comparability of gender pay gap data with England, Scotland and Wales.
However, the proposed regulations for Northern Ireland would go further than current gender pay gap reporting requirements in the rest of the UK by also requiring affected employers to publish:
- An action plan detailing the actions they are taking to address the gender pay gap within their organisation.
- And “information including statistics on workers within each pay band in relation to ethnicity and disability”, although no further detail is included in the consultation document as to what this will look like in practice and there may well be difficulties gathering the relevant data as employees’ ethnic origin and disability status are not always recorded.
Timing and next steps
The consultation closes on 14 February 2025. Employers that wish to respond to the consultation can do so here.
The consultation document indicates an intention to publish draft regulations as soon as possible, but flags that this will only be possible after some necessary technical amendments to the Employment Act (Northern Ireland) 2016 have been made. The regulations are therefore not expected to take effect before 2027 and employers would then be given time to prepare before they are required to report.
In the rest of the UK, meanwhile, the Employment Rights Bill proposes to require employers that are caught by gender pay gap reporting requirements to publish gender pay gap action plans, a measure that could well take effect before gender pay gap reporting is brought into force in Northern Ireland. We are also expecting a draft Equality (Race and Disability Bill) to set out new requirements for ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting in the rest of the UK. However, that is likely to take much longer to progress through Parliament so it is possible that Northern Ireland could end up leading the way on such reporting.
