Oral evidence: Gender Pay Gap, HC 584Tuesday 12 January 2016

Oral evidence, 12 January 2016.

Witnesses

Anna Ritchie, Project Manager, Close the Gap, Christopher Brooks, Policy Adviser, Age UK, Scarlet Harris, Head of Gender Equality, TUC, and Mr Robert Stephenson-Padron, Managing Director, Penrose Care, gave evidence.

Chair

Thank you very much, and thank you also that most of you were in for the first session as well. Thank you for that time. On behalf of the Committee and other members who will be re-joining us—I think they are just catching up on various things—thank you so much for coming in to give evidence today. We are conscious of the fact that you are incredibly busy people, and to give up this time is very generous of you. We really value these sessions and it is such an important inquiry, so thank you again. You will have seen from the previous session that members have various questions to ask you, and we will attempt to keep better to time this time. Before we do that, would I be able to ask you to each state your name and where you come from, starting with Anna?

Anna Ritchie Allan

I am Anna Ritchie Allan, from Close the Gap. We work in Scotland on women’s participation in the labour market, and we work with employers, employees, unions and policy-makers to address the causes of the pay gap.

Chair

Sorry about the interference at the moment, but we will try to soldier on through.

Christopher Brooks

I am Christopher Brooks. I work for Age UK. We are the national charity for older people.

Scarlet Harris

I am Scarlet Harris. I am the women’s equality officer at the TUC.

Robert Stephenson-Padron

I am Robert Stephenson-Padron. I am the Managing Director of Penrose Care, an ethical homecare provider.

Maria Caulfield

In this session we want to look at the low paid sector and see whether the gender pay gap is the same or worse for low paid workers. I want to start off by asking you what the pay levels are like in highly feminised sectors such as healthcare and cleaning. Do you think there is a gender pay gap and, if so, what percentage would you say is the gap? It is open to all of you.

Anna Ritchie Allan

There is a gap in every sector. What we know about female-dominant sectors is that the sectors themselves are undervalued as are the jobs that are in the sector, because it is women who are doing them. In terms of percentages, I do not have that detail but someone else on the panel might.

Scarlet Harris

Just to come in on what Anna said, I completely support that. That is very much the TUC’s view: that it is because it is women doing the work that it is undervalued. Low pay tends to follow where women work. Where men come into traditionally feminised sectors, the pay tends to go up; where women move into sectors where they have not been before the pay tends to go down. In those very feminised sectors, which were already mentioned, like cleaning, the pay is incredibly low. We have done some research, particularly around low pay and part-time work, which has found that women part-timers, in many areas, were being paid less that the living wage. We did it by constituency and found that in 130 constituencies women part-timers were being paid less than the living wage, including lots of constituencies in London. There are real issues around very low pay in those sectors.

Christopher Brooks

There are also issues around progression, so perhaps for occupations like cleaning or social care, the next level up even does not deliver a particularly substantial increase in pay. Beyond that, there is probably nowhere to go for a lot of people working in those areas.

Robert Stephenson-Padron

Within social care specifically, I would say yes, it is a macro-level of undervaluing. In social care, which covers about 1.5 million workers in England, about 82% of those are female. The frontline wage is £7.10 an hour, so that is for a frontline care worker. A big issue, though, is in homecare, which is the sector Penrose Care specifically operates in, where there are about 650,000 workers in England, about 86% of them are women, and a large number of them are not paid the minimum wage. Whereas the headline wage may be £7.10 an hour, for a variety of reasons we can speak about later on, many of them have an effective median wage power of £5.75 an hour, and that is predominantly due to the non-payment of travelling between clients’ homes. As you probably know, that is significantly below the national minimum wage, which is £6.70 an hour for people 21 years and over.

Maria Caulfield

Just a couple more questions: what is your experience of men who work in those sectors? Are they paid the same as fellow female workers? Are they paid slightly more even though they are in the same sector?

Robert Stephenson-Padron

In homecare I would not say that the gender gap is material within the sector, but there are a large number of female workers in the country—I think if my statistics are right, you have about 12 million female workers in England and about 1.2 million female workers in social care—so if a large number of them have very poor working conditions their poor working conditions feed into the national gender pay gap. It is a female-dominated sector so many managers are also female. Looking specifically within this sector, you do not have a material gender pay gap, but it does contribute to the wider gender pay gap in the country.

Scarlet Harris

There are other low paid feminised sectors, like retail, where you would see a gender pay gap because lots of the managers are men. Working in a supermarket, you are more likely to have men at supervisory or managerial levels and more of the women on the lower skilled and lower paid levels.

Maria Caulfield

What I am really trying to identify is whether those sectors are low paid and seem to attract women, or whether they are low paid because it is women in those sectors?

Anna Ritchie Allan

The latter.

Chair

Do you want to expand on that, Anna?

Anna Ritchie Allan

Yes, when we look at the types of work that are female‑dominated, low paid and undervalued, they are centred on work that has been done traditionally by women in the home. It is because those skills are undervalued—caring, cooking, cleaning and clerical work—because they are done by women that they result in low pay.

Maria Caulfield

Do you all agree with that?

Scarlet Harris

Yes, I would absolutely agree with that. There is a huge undervaluing of women’s work across society—women’s paid and unpaid work. As Anna said, there is a view about lots of the attributes that might go along with some of these feminised sectors, particularly around care. Care is really crucial to what we are talking about in terms of women’s low pay. There is an issue there about a perception that this is just what women do. Women care. That is something that women can and should do and it is not something that is massively valued by society.

Jess Phillips

Specifically in the care sector, I just wonder if, for example, you had a young woman who came in to work for you, as she did more qualifications, an NVQ level—I do not know what your entry level is, 3 or 4 or whatever—in health and social care, would her pay increase because of those qualifications? Because I understand what you are saying about static; the idea of progression is rare in these things. There is not enough opportunity to progress. Lots of people do not want to progress. We should not think or sit here with a middle class idea that everybody wants to get to the very top of their game. My husband certainly wants to punch a card and go home at the end of the day. However, always, when he got more qualifications in his work, although his job did not change, his finances did.

Robert Stephenson-Padron

I would say, historically, in social care that was the case. If you did get more qualifications, your pay went up. Clearly if you became a manager, so that is gaining a level 5 diploma, your pay goes up significantly, if you can get that. The issue is that the sector as a whole is financially unstable. It has been in the news quite a lot. I have to get references from other care managers, and what I have found over the past few years is that their terms and conditions have deteriorated. It is often hard to get hold of care managers because their hours have been cut to part-time. Who is running these organisations now? You do not know. I would say from a level 2 to a level 5, yes, there is a jump. However, going from, say, a level 2, which is not mandatory—that is typically a qualification a frontline worker can get optionally—to a level 3, level 3 typically being for a worker who manages about 25 employees, usually their pay would go up; now, it is not certain. It completely depends on the financial health of the specific organisation.

Maria Caulfield

Robert, I have read that you pay your employees the London living wage and yet when the new living wage was introduced, one of the key things I noticed was how many social care organisations lobbied me about how difficult it would be to pay the new living wage. Yet you pay the London living wage. How are you able to do that when other care providers are not able to do that? Why are they so reluctant to do that?

Robert Stephenson-Padron

At Penrose Care we have been quite fortunate because it was our decision to be an ethical provider from the beginning. We built our business model to do that, which means that we have to gear our users of services towards people who can pay a higher rate, so self-payers, who are willing to pay a higher rate. Some self-payers are not willing to pay a higher rate. We can then also have some users who receive direct payments and we can charge a discount. The sector as a whole cannot do that because 80% of the market is funded by the state. I have the figures, of course, which are from the professional association, the UK Homecare Association. It estimates a local council needs to pay—just for providers to pay the minimum wage—£16.17 an hour. The last data that they showed showed only four councils in the country paid a rate at which providers can meet the minimum wage. When you speak about not increasing the rates that providers receive from, say, 80% of their customers and increasing those costs you will have a lot of issues because they already cannot pay the minimum wage. If you increase the minimum wage, you have to do something to improve the financial viability of the providers first.

Maria Caulfield

I have one final quick question: do you think gender pay gap reporting for organisations would help improve pay for women in low paid sectors?

Christopher Brooks

It sends out a signal that it is a really important issue for everybody, regardless of occupation. It might start a debate about the relevance of different skillsets that people have and hopefully push a bit more positive direction towards the caring and cleaning types of skills that are more associated with women. It is also worth noting with the care sector that because the care sector is so chronically underfunded, it does push more caring responsibilities towards informal carers, which in turn has a greater impact on women, particularly 50-plus women in the workplace, who are more likely to care. Again, it is another issue which I think is really crucial to the gender pay gap.

Mrs Drummond

My question is very similar to what Maria was saying. I know it is female dominated but, within that, are men and women paid the same? Is there a gender pay gap? Also is there an age thing? You said that there were more men being managers in retail, but do you think that is beginning to change? Is it just carrying on like that?

Scarlet Harris

There are lots of sectors you could point to where the trend is that the bulk of the lower paid, lower skilled work within that sector is done by women, and managerial positions—

Mrs Drummond

But are men and women being paid the same at that low level or are they progressing faster? Is this an age thing?

Scarlet Harris

There are several different issues. If we are looking at equal pay, it is not necessarily about comparing like-for-like jobs. It is about work of equal value. If you are looking at a local authority, it may not be comparing that female care worker to a male care worker, if there are very few male care workers; it may also be looking at other jobs done by men within that local authority that are comparable. We have already talked about how those skills that those women have, which actually are incredibly important and valuable skills, are often not properly valued and not measured correctly. Therefore, some of the emotional burden, as well as the physical burden of doing physical work, is often undervalued. There is an issue there about equal pay and the gender pay gap reporting is not the same as an equal pay audit. It is not going as far as we would like. The TUC still calls for equal pay audits. There is also an issue—you have mentioned progression and where people move on—I would highlight, which is that where men are in low paid jobs and low paid sectors they tend not to stay as long as women. In the previous session, you talked a bit about women getting stuck in those jobs and part-time work. That is really crucial to this: that where men may be in low paid jobs for a while, they often move up or move on quite quickly, whereas women do not.

Mrs Drummond

Thank you for that. That answers my rather badly put question.

Chair

We are going to move on to talk about part-time working but, before we do that, I have a question for Scarlet. Scarlet, you were just talking about comparing different jobs in a local authority. If you took a local authority workforce in the care sector, what percentage of those women, predominantly, would be unionised or members of a union?

Scarlet Harris

I do not have the figures off the top of my head, unfortunately. Unions do organise in the care sector. It is increasingly difficult because lots of those women are working for agencies, are on zero hours’ contracts and are moving around. It makes it much harder for them to be a member of a union and be well organised within a union. Obviously the GMB and others organise in the care sector.

Chair

Would you be able to provide us with some information on that, particularly the trends over time in terms of union membership of people who are in those sorts of sectors, particularly the cleaning sector and the care sector, because it would be useful for us to be aware of that?

Scarlet Harris

Yes, definitely.

Anna Ritchie Allan

Following on from what Scarlet said, the move towards transferring female-dominated staff in from local authorities and other public sector bodies out to arm’s-length external organisations, trusts and other bodies, that in itself is putting pressure on female-dominated sectors’ terms and conditions. We see cleaning staff, certainly in Scotland, and care workers put out to trusts and put out to ALEOs, as they are called, and we see an enforced reduction in hours, reductions in flexible working requests and downward pressures on pay and other terms and conditions. When it comes to the Scottish public sector organisations, which already have to report the gender pay gap and have done for a few years, it means that they do not have to count those female workers who are low paid in their gender pay gap figures.

Scarlet Harris

Just to support that, Unison has done some really good commissioned work. It is excellent academic research on the impact of commissioning out on women’s pay in particular. I do not have the figures to hand but the answer was that it had a very detrimental effect on women’s pay. So where women were moving from local government into arm’s-length organisations and the private sector it was very, very bad for their pay.

Chair

We have heard in other evidence sessions that part-time working can have a penalty attached to it in terms of pay and can help drive some of the gender pay gap issues that we are talking about. What proportion of women in the sorts of jobs we are talking about here today are working part-time? Can you give us an idea of whether that is due to their choice or it is the way those jobs are designed? Scarlett, do you want to start?

Scarlet Harris

In retail, for example, part-time is the norm. It is not just part-time; it is short hours’ contracts, which is similar to zero hours’ contracts but it may be that you are contracted for six hours a week, but your employer can call you up at very short notice and say, “Actually we need you to come in for another day.” It is not just about part-time; it is about different types of contracts, which are very difficult for women with caring responsibilities in particular to manage their lives. Anyone who has tried to organise childcare will know it is very difficult to tell the nursery that you need them for another day when you are not booked for another day because your employer has decided that you need to come into work that day. In some sectors it is about part-time being the norm. In some, it is more about other kinds of flexibility, but on the part of the employer rather than the employee being the norm. With regards to the question of choice, I sometimes think that talking about choice in this is not particularly helpful; it slightly confuses the issue. It is impossible to know what choices people make and how constrained those choices are. Yes, a woman with caring responsibilities may choose to work part-time but that is not necessarily because she desperately wants to spend more time at home and wants to work part-time. Certainly there is evidence that lots of women who are working part-time would like more hours but they cannot get them or they cannot find childcare, or other forms of care, to fit in around their work, so they are constrained to do that work. In addition to that, it is not about whether the women are choosing to work part-time; it is whether they are choosing to work in a low paid part-time job with no progression. The answer to that is almost universally no. They are choosing to take the only part-time work that is on offer to them, which is often low paid with few progression prospects.

Chair

Robert, as an employer, are there any incentives—perverse or otherwise—for you to design a job to be part-time rather than full-time?

Robert Stephenson-Padron

In homecare there is an incentive to use part-time and flexible working depending on the mix of your users. If you are a social care provider where most of your users are a series of short visits, then having these part-time contracts or flexible working contracts could be very useful. If you are heavily geared towards palliative care then of course flexible contracts could be useful as well, because your clients die often, and that way you do not have to pay for the staff time when you have no work. If the sector was more financially healthy, there is also an advantage to have an inventory of staff time, which is easier to have when the workers know that they are going to have work because then they do not go and find another job. If you do have an inventory of staff time, as a grocery store has an inventory of groceries, when you have new users come to you, you can take them. As you have probably heard as well, another big topic at the moment here in England is bed-blocking. This has resulted from the social care sector not having capacity, not being able to take dischargees in a timely manner. For us it has been quite horrifying because we are based in north London. I had a call from a borough way out towards Heathrow one day saying that they could not find a single social care provider to take on a dischargee. This was before the winter, so I can only imagine how bad it is now.

Chair

Particularly in terms of things like national insurance rules, that does not encourage you to design more part-time jobs? Is it literally that you are more driven by what your customers need?

Robert Stephenson-Padron

When you look at social care, a great summary of social care is what Dr Davies said in the last presentation. She said good practice affects all; bad practice affects women. When you look at the policy framework towards social care, you also have to look at what polices are working when you ask that question. A big problem in social care—we do not have the data on it because it is not a widely known issue, like the minimum wage violation—is you do have many cases of misclassification of employees as independent contractors to avoid paying employers’ NI altogether. I have also interviewed new workers for us where they have been classified as employees and their employers pay them under the table, so there is no NI. They do not pay them holiday pay. When you ask that question for our sector, you also have to first ask, “Are people paying employers’ NI to begin with?” I do not think it is necessarily an incentive to change the job structure, because many providers are not paying it anyway.

Chair

Anna, in your experience, looking at this market, do you see part-time working being the norm through choice or necessity?

Anna Ritchie Allan

I would agree with what Scarlet said: that we need to think about choice and consider fully what the constraints are on those choices in terms of women’s disproportionate share of caring responsibilities; the choice also of what sectors they go into and looking back earlier at schools, looking at gender norms and gender stereotyping, expectations and attitudes about how girls and boys should behave, and what they should be interested in, and how that filters through the education system and results in young men and young women in stereotypical occupations, such as the female-dominated, undervalued sectors we are talking about today, such as cooking, cleaning and so on. Our experience of working with employers—and perhaps this is more relevant to some other sectors as well—is that employers seem to view part-time working as an accommodation to encourage retention where they are in favour of that, rather than it being a positive action that can encourage different types of people to come and work for their companies.

Chair

To what extent do you think the benefit system is encouraging people to work part-time?

Anna Ritchie Allan

Do you mean the 16-hour rule? The benefit system is so massively complex just now. What we know is that women who do work part-time just now and then have to go through a very detailed process in trying to get working tax credits and trying to top up their pay often have to take other types of part-time work. That is not quality work or quality life at all, in working for very low pay and then having to be subjected to a benefits process that often devalues people and the lives that they are living.

Chair

You would support a simplification of the benefit system to help change that.

Anna Ritchie Allan

I think a simplification of a complicated process would be welcome, yes.

Chair

Christopher, you are interested in looking at the issues facing people who have caring responsibilities. What opportunities do you think women have to move in and out of part-time working? Because those caring responsibilities may not be there forever, and part-time working can be something you need to do in the short term, but not necessarily in the long term.

Christopher Brooks

Yes, and what the evidence on this shows is that it is particularly women and older people who get stuck in part-time work and cannot progress out of it. The shock of having to leave work, if you are in your 50s and you develop a caring responsibility, a huge number of people—it is about 300,000 people a year—are forced out of work because of a caring responsibility, and it can be very difficult to get back in. We heard in the earlier session about some of the length of time that it is feasible to have a gap in your CV, but it is similar for lower-skilled roles as well. If you are unemployed for six-months-plus, it can become very difficult to move back in. Even if you were in a higher-skilled professional role before, if you have to stop work completely to care, then to move back in you are much more likely to eventually get a part-time role in a lower-skilled sector. It can have a really long lasting impact.

Chair

Are there particular things that you would advocate happening to help address that particular problem?

Christopher Brooks

With caring responsibilities, similar to maternity, not leaving work is really important, so it is about any measures that can help people to stay in work. We have just been doing some research into carers at the moment and we will be publishing a report on it in the next few months. We are looking at things like carer’s leave and how that might work. You may have a statutory right to a set number of either paid or unpaid carer’s leave per year. Even unpaid leave can be helpful, because it gives you some job security and a bit of flexibility, and you know that you can go back to it, so rather than having an argument with your employer and then you subsequently either get made redundant immediately or end up at the top of the redundancy list, you do have some right of reply to them on that, ideally, with pay, but obviously there might be more limited scope for that. Things like that are really important to bridge the gap. Linking with the health and care system as well, we ran a couple of focus groups just before Christmas, and we heard repeatedly about, particularly for people who were caring with people with dementia or complex needs, the length of time it can take to get a diagnosis and so the care becomes eligible for support. By the time that has all been resolved it is often far too late for people. If it takes five or six months, then by that time they are out of work and it is too late.

Angela Crawley

I just wanted to cover the concepts of caring and childcare, and it may be directed at Anna and Christopher in particular. How significant are caring responsibilities, including childcare, as a barrier to better paid work for them?

Christopher Brooks

Because about 60% of 50-plus carers are women, and it is about a 60:40 split, the burden does fall disproportionately on women. Women are more likely to feel the effects in the labour market as well. There is a social expectation that it should be women who cut back from work or stop working altogether to care. It is a really substantial barrier, and it is likely to get worse as well. There was a think tank that reported about the care gap. I forget exactly what they called it but the idea was that by 2017 there would be more informal care needs than informal carers to provide it. In a sense, that could be good for gender equality as the burden might fall more on to men. It is a huge problem. We see a lot about it being very difficult to raise caring with your employer. It is often reported to us as being completely different to childcare, where a bit of flexibility and a bit of understanding around childcare is a lot more normal in workplaces. Caring for older people can become very, very tricky to raise with managers who simply do not want to know, and it can often drag up a whole host of other issues.

Anna Ritchie Allan

I would agree that childcare is the most immediate barrier for women participating equally in the labour market. Childcare is unaffordable and inaccessible in many places. Childcare costs in the UK are among the highest in the world and are a significant barrier to women going back to work after they have had children. The Equality and Human Rights Commission published research last year on pregnancy and maternity discrimination. As well as the general findings, which were that pregnancy and maternity discrimination has doubled in the past 10 years, also an interesting point was that although most women who were part of the research had had their flexible working request met, about half of them had experienced negative effects as a consequence of working flexibly. So, going back and then having to work flexibly to accommodate childcare had some negative consequences. I would also point out that because women do move into part-time work to accommodate these caring responsibilities, and childcare is often very complicated and runs with military precision for lots of parents, and if they are in a part-time job—which is very often the case in these low paid, undervalued sectors—it is quite a stressful process. If you are earning such a low amount and you are paying this amount out in childcare, they begin to say, “I am just getting this money to pay for childcare, so is it worth my while or shall I just let my partner work and I will take time out?” The research shows that the scarring, negative effect of taking a complete career break out for unpaid family work, is twice as bad for that as it is for working part-time in itself. These sorts of actions, decisions or the constraints on women’s choices in terms of childcare and balancing work with life are compounded and are cumulative.

Scarlet Harris

I support everything that Anna has just said, but just to add to that, some groups of mothers are particularly disadvantaged by the higher costs of childcare and the types of provisions available. For mothers of disabled children, there are particular issues around the types of childcare provision that are available and not having the suitable childcare available. Again, single mothers find it particularly difficult to find childcare that is affordable and fits with their working hours. It is worth noting that there are these particular groups. There are also women with multiple caring responsibilities. It is really important that we do not just see these as separate issues; we have childcare over here, we have elder care over here, but actually all of us are probably going to need care at some time in our lives, and are probably going to care for someone in our lives, whether it is our children and/or our parents or partners. The employers need to see it in that way as well: that people are going to move in and out of having caring responsibilities and, at some times in their working careers, women in particular are likely to bear multiple caring responsibilities and still have school-aged children and possibly an elderly or sick parent or a disabled partner. There are some additional barriers for some women.

Angela Crawley

I am really grateful for the points you have made on the barriers, but I suppose the outcomes and what policy measures could be taken to address those concerns would be really helpful as well, so perhaps we could have some recommendations on policy measures within those areas.

Robert Stephenson-Padron

Penrose Care belongs to a network run by Carers UK called Employers for Carers, which is a network of mainly corporate employers and government organisations trying to work out ways to accommodate elder care responsibilities, because, as Christopher said, they are becoming much more common and they are going to become more common going forward. The idea was discussed in 2014—it has not gone anywhere since then—of what kinds of incentives the Government can provide to organisations to provide in their optional benefits elder care benefits. Many organisations have optional benefits included in your compensation. Having elder care vouchers, say, to purchase formal care when needed, in addition to childcare vouchers, is something that needs to be done. It does not just need to be done because it is a good idea; it needs to be done because the public sector has not been able to fund the need, which means that all of society needs to fund the need, because it is there. Any types of incentive to corporates to help foot the bill of our aging society is a good idea, I would say.

Chair

Have you come across any case studies of where that is happening?

Robert Stephenson-Padron

I have not. There was an article published by the BBC in March 2014. It is in this small report that I wrote for the Committee. I will pass it to you guys afterwards.

Scarlet Harris

It is such a huge issue. There are lots of different ways of looking at this and different ways of attacking it. In terms of the cost of childcare, it is not going to be free. There has to be greater investment in childcare. There has to be greater Government investment. I know no one wants to hear about investing more money, but investment in what the Women’s Budget Group calls social infrastructure and the whole of our caring infrastructure, whether that is care for the elderly or care for the children, from the supply side, not just giving money to parents, but giving money to nurseries, which would also help with the pay of the women working in those sectors and help with their training and progression. That kind of investment on the supply side into the care sector is really crucial and there is no way round that. One thing that is not talked about enough is the role of employers investing in that. We have just heard about employers investing in care for the elderly. In other countries the model is parents pay into childcare, the Government pay into childcare and employers pay into childcare, because they massively benefit from women being able to come to work and leave their children in childcare. There is a model there in Europe. That is what happens in France and some other countries, but it is never talked about here. We can talk about levies for employers on apprenticeships; why can we not talk about levies for employers on childcare? This is particularly for larger employers who rely on a predominantly female workforce working on very low pay and variable hours, such as in retail. Would it not be possible for them to make some kind of contribution towards that? There is also something about the culture and making this not just a women’s problem. We have been talking a lot about this in terms of it being a women’s problem. I know you talked about this a bit in the previous session, but there needs to be more to ensure that fathers are getting involved in childcare too and that employers are not just seeing women as the ones who are going to take time off or want to work part-time, or have unreasonable requests around childcare. It needs to start right at the beginning; there needs to be earnings-related paternity pay for fathers so it makes it affordable for them to take time off right at the beginning to start getting involved in childcare, and for there to be more of an incentive for dads to do that. That is the only way that we will move towards a more shared parenting culture.

Christopher Brooks

I have already mentioned carer’s leave, but we have also looked a lot at flexible working. It is really clear that flexible working is a lot less available to people working in lower-skilled roles. If you are a professional, it is a lot easier to access it. That has a detrimental impact on women. The removal of the 26-week period for the right to request would be really helpful. It would allow people, at the point of recruitment, to make a formal request. The right to request has been very successful, and employers buy into it. It is quite empowering for individuals, more than anything. Ideally we would like to go even beyond that and a step beyond the right to request, and have a system of what we have called flexible by default, which would really be the idea that you can assume you can work flexibly. You would be able to pitch an idea to your employer, who would then be able to reject it on the same business reasons as currently exist—if it is not workable for them. It is really an attitudinal change more than anything, more than a legal change. It is just empowering for individuals, and allowing people to have open conversations in the workplace and build a trusting environment, which ultimately, across a whole range of issues, is what can make the biggest difference. I do not know whether you want me to give you another policy recommendation around training. Particularly for part-time work you are a lot less likely to get investment from your employer in training you. The skills system at the moment has obviously been cut back hugely over the last few years and employer investment has also decreased. Therefore, we need measures to try to fill the gap there. We need to look very carefully about how to reinvigorate investment in training for everybody. Looking at measures like lifetime learning accounts, which have come up in the past, is the way we need to think about going with training, just to try to make it more accessible.

Angela Crawley

Anna, I know you have the toughest task because everyone has already covered quite a lot.

Anna Ritchie Allan

Is there anything left to say? I agree with what everyone else has said about increasing the availability of flexible working and improving the quality of part-time work available. I particularly agree with what Scarlet said about employers’ responsibilities and how we can work to encourage them to provide childcare allowance and childcare vouchers. However, that is not to detract from the fact that free or significantly subsidised universal childcare would have a transformative effect on the women’s labour market participation. There is also infrastructure; the way that public investment works, the focus that is traditionally on capital investment disproportionately benefits men. Looking at childcare as infrastructure, you would also have a significant impact in terms of seeing how childcare functions in society and how it allows women and men to participate in the labour market, to grow local economies and to grow the national economy. What would be required with that is raising of standards, pay and terms and conditions in the workforce where women predominate and in low paid jobs.

Chair

Ben, I think you had a question.

Ben Howlett

It follows on from a point you were just making, which relates to productivity. Obviously productivity is the question of the day at the moment—the topic of hot debate here. How much recognition is there within employers that employing more women would increase their productivity? Because the stats seem to speak for themselves but there seems to be not much narrative coming out amongst employers, whether that is the private or public sector.

Christopher Brooks

I do not think there is much recognition. We deal mainly with the over 50s. There is a really strong stereotype that older workers are less productive, and particularly that older female workers are less productive. That is one of the most glaring errors. If you look at the research, there is absolutely minimal evidence to suggest that that is at all correct. In fact, for individual productivity, if anything, older workers are at least as productive as everybody else and also employers can do more to help themselves by looking at things like reasonable adjustments, whether that is flexible working or physical adjustments for older workers who might have a health condition or for people with disabilities. Those kinds of measures can really raise productivity. All too often, it is the short-term, easier solution that seems to prevail. It is often, sadly, based on stereotypes. That is why we need to change attitudes generally across a whole range of these issues.

Mrs Drummond

We have covered a lot of this already, particularly in the last session, which a lot of you heard, but what barriers do women face in returning to the labour market in this particular sector? Is there an issue of the length of the break, which is what we heard in the last session too—that they had been away for more than 12 months? Can I start with Robert, please?

Robert Stephenson-Padron

With our sector it is a bit unusual because staff turnover is so high. Whether you have just left for a short period of time or for a long period of time, it does not make a huge difference, especially because management structures are probably flatter in social care than they are in other places as well. The staff turnover rate in social care, on the frontline end, in England is about 30%, so you would expect that maybe if you come back in five years there might be a whole set of different people. If you lowered the staff turnover in social care, which is the goal for everyone, then you would start to have these issues that you have in other sectors. At the moment, this sector is too much in a horrific state for that to be an issue.

Mrs Drummond

Why have you large turnovers? How are you going to correct that?

Robert Stephenson-Padron

One of the primary ways to lower the staff turnover rates is, number one, to start paying at least the minimum wage and, as fast as we can, to get to the living wage. Care is something that people like to do, from a vocational basis, but if you are in a situation where you cannot live, or you can do a similar or easier job for higher pay, you are going to go and do that. At the moment the pay is so low in the sector that until you fix that staff turnover is going to remain high.

Mrs Drummond

When they are leaving, are they finding better jobs because they are just using it—they have gone out the market for a bit, they have gone and got a job, as we heard from the previous session, they are working for two or three months, that is going to make a massive difference, and then they can get a better paid job?

Robert Stephenson-Padron

I was speaking to someone from Skills for Care, which is our sector’s skills council last month about this issue. She said the reality is that because the data we have on this issue is so poor, we do not know. We do not know where people are going. She did say by intuition they are generally going to other care providers for slightly higher pay or exiting the sector altogether. However, she said that because the data on this is coming from the employers, the employers do not necessarily know at a macro-level where the people are going.

Mrs Drummond

You pay the living wage, so what is your turnover like in your company?

Robert Stephenson-Padron

I can supply the exact data afterwards. It is much lower than the average, I would say.

Mrs Drummond

Have you any other comments on that? You have talked about childcare; are there any other barriers that you think are stopping people from coming back to work? What length, again, do you think is acceptable to go out of work and come back again?

Christopher Brooks

Possibly the unemployment support system is mixed; that is the fairest way of expressing it and people’s experience of it. Jobcentre Plus is not always sensitive enough to the needs of people with additional caring responsibilities or health conditions. There is scope for improvement there as well, just making it a bit more receptive and helping people find jobs that are more suitable, providing a more bespoke service, with a bit more intensive support where needed a bit more quickly and those kinds of things.

Mrs Drummond

Do you agree with the issue about if you are out of work for more than 12 months, or do you think in this sector you can cope with people who have been out for longer?

Christopher Brooks

Across the whole economy, if you are out of work for about six to eight months—that kind of period—while you are out of work, it becomes increasingly hard to get back in, at least to the same level as before. Once you hit about six to eight months, it makes less difference whether you are then out of work for two years; it becomes very difficult to get back in at that point.

Anna Ritchie Allan

As Robert was saying, the nature of the high turnover means that there is so much churn in the sector and these jobs. Because they often have poor terms and conditions, low pay, poor working practices, the length of time that you have out of a job is not as problematic as you have in other sectors, I would suggest, particularly in professional sectors, where women with higher levels of education are less likely to take prolonged periods—career breaks—out to do unpaid family care. It is more likely in lower paid sectors.

Chair

Can I gently move us on to the last area of questioning, because I am conscious of the time? I am sorry; I feel like I am slightly curtailing the discussion.

Jo Churchill

This is talking about progression and performance again. What opportunities do women have to make progression and also what evidence is there that they are looking for progression? What often strikes me is that there this is this multi-factorial pull that they may want more hours but they cannot get the childcare or they cannot get the transport, or whatever of those different things. How much progression are they looking for and how much is it possible to achieve?

Scarlet Harris

That goes back to the question of job design and what jobs need to look like. That is working on the assumption that in order to move up a step or in order to take the next step up the career ladder, you must be working X number more hours and you must be available on call all the time. You would not possibly ever be able to see your children. There must be a way for employers to design jobs more intelligently and to think more about, “Does this job need to be full-time? Could all of our jobs be advertised on a flexible basis?” Working Families have a “Happy to talk flexible working” strapline or kitemark on job adverts. We need to think about encouraging those discussion about flexible working at all levels and model good practice of flexible working, high quality part-time opportunities across organisations, not just part-time jobs at the bottom of the organisation, and for it not to be seen as either you choose to work on low pay, low skills in a part-time position that might suit your caring requirements, or you choose to never see your children and work full-time in an incredibly highly pressured job. There are lots of jobs where there is no reason in the world why you could not do them as a job share or on a flexible basis, or perhaps working from home sometimes. It is about making that accessible. We have already talked about—perhaps it was in the last session—the current requirements for the right to request flexible working and the 26-week eligibility criteria, and that is a huge barrier for lots of women, or anyone with caring responsibilities. If you have those responsibilities, it is not a question of trying to dupe an employer; it is a question of not being able to work for 26 weeks or of being able to ask your employer for a more flexible arrangement, not knowing whether your employer will grant it or not, because not all requests are granted. Therefore, it is about being able to have those conversations upfront, particularly within an organisation where the employer might already know you have caring requirements.

Anna Ritchie Allan

Just to add to that and to provide an example as well, if you look at admin workers, the majority of whom are women, it is often a low paid job. There are a lot of issues around gender and training. They were picked up earlier on in terms of low paid, part-time female workers being the least likely to receive any type of training. There is the issue of availability of training and whether or not it is held within the hours that a part-time worker is working, but particularly looking at admin, it is very, very unusual to find a clear progression pathway from an admin job into a non-admin job, so in a development or programme role, for example. With the increasing pressure on budgets for employers in terms of training, what that means is that it results often in a freeze on non‑essential training. Admin workers, for example, need that type of training to make the move across, so if they are only allowed to do training that is directly related to their role, there is no development there, there are no opportunities to progress in another way and that is why there often seems to be a second glass ceiling that is above the senior admin grades in an organisation.

Robert Stephenson-Padron

Within homecare, with respect to progression, it is useful to look at nursing. Even though it is a social care role, it is similar to healthcare in the fact that there is huge benefit in keeping your best people on the frontline. That is where a lot of the care workers want to be. That is where the action happens. I spend a lot of time in hospitals, when our users go to hospital, and some of the best nurses, who are older, are still on the frontline and they are excellent. What we need to do in social care, and this is something we were working with the UK Commission for Employment and Skills to try to develop was to explore what kind of additional training you can give to social care workers to develop new premier markets for people who pay extra, where social care workers can gravitate towards and then they would progress in terms of pay, but they would also still be on the frontline doing care work. It is also the case that I am a care manager, and it is so different to being a care worker. I would question whether many people would want to be a care manager, which is 180 degrees different from being a care worker.

Jo Churchill

It is that transition which slightly backs up your comments, Anna, that it is about the appropriateness of training in order to make the marketplace more skilled but more fluid as well. It is meeting those needs. Christopher, did you want to add anything?

Christopher Brooks

Yes, I would just add about mid-life career reviews at this point, as a way of helping people progress through the workplace and to set out their ambitions and then work out what they need to do to meet them. Mid-life career reviews were piloted by BIS a couple of years ago and the TUC were very heavily involved in them through Unionlearn. They proved to be a very effective way of engaging people—and very low cost as well, crucially—in thinking about what they want to achieve through the later part of their working life. It was aimed at people around the age of 50 and it gave people the chance to sit down with a trained adviser, either a union rep or the National Careers Service was involved with it too. Non-unionised workplaces train people as well. It proved to be very, very effective at helping people plan their later working life, and it is still run by some of the organisations that were involved with it, like Unionlearn and the National Careers Service, even though they are no longer paid for it. Finding a way of rolling that out to both people in and out of work on a larger scale can be a really effective intervention for people. It can help people plan what they want to do and what training they might need to do it and also how to talk to employers and that kind of thing about achieving what they want to.

Jo Churchill

That would be, in part, an answer to the final question, which is: what can be done to facilitate greater opportunities? That really is an honest conversation about people’s needs, is it not? You have just described a mid-life appraisal about where they want to go, what they might need to support them in order to keep them working. An issue here is the fact that with an older working population caring for older and older generations who are surviving longer and having children later, you have an extrapolation of all these things over a much longer timeline. Who should the recommendations be directed at and what can be done to facilitate greater opportunities?

Scarlet Harris

Can I slightly build on what Christopher was saying? I completely support, obviously, the recommendation on mid-life career reviews. In addition to that, it is really important that we think about, if the point of a mid-life career review is to signpost someone towards training they might want to do in order to progress, ensuring that those training opportunities are there. Cuts to the further education sector and adult education sector have been hugely detrimental, particularly to women in low paid jobs. Cuts to funding for, for example, English as a second language have presented massive barriers to women wanting to get into the labour market who do not have the required English skills. We have seen the impact of some of those policy decisions. For example, the TUC did some work a couple of years ago on equality and apprenticeships and mapped out the growth in apprenticeships against various policy interventions and the point at which Train to Gain funding was removed. Apprenticeships went through the roof and we have seen that, while the TUC completely support the focus on apprenticeships and getting more young people into training and tackling NEETs, a lot of that funding has ended up being used by employers as a replacement for other funding that they had to do on-the-job training. Arguably, large employers should be paying for some of that training themselves. If you are training retail staff to do what they need to do in a shop, you should probably pay for that yourself rather than take apprenticeship funding to do it. However, it is a roundabout way of saying that lots of this has a really direct impact on older women, women over 40, in the workplace, who currently do not have anywhere to go in order to get that training. If they decide that they do not want to be stuck in retail, or whatever it is they are doing, and they want to progress, or they are currently on a career break and have taken several years out after having children, they want to go back doing something similar or doing something different, there is nowhere for them to go unless they have the means to fund themselves to do vocational training or to get on to those kinds of schemes.

Chair

Can I ask a supplementary on that, because obviously we are dealing with women over 40 who still endure a massive pay gap, whereas for women under 40 that has been all but eliminated for those in full-time work particularly? Going back to what happened in the past, which is sort of what you are advocating, does not feel that attractive to me, given we are currently trying to deal with a problem that has been inherited. What would you do differently that would mean that we would not just repeat the situation that we have now?

Scarlet Harris

I am not suggesting going back to the past because I completely understand that that is not the focus of this Committee. We are looking at what we can do for those women now and I am advocating funding for FE. These are very recent cuts to FE funding and adult education funding.

Chair

Could I argue that we are in the situation that we are now, even though in the past those women did have access to that funding? What would be different now that would mean that we would not just be repeating the same mistakes we made in the past?

Scarlet Harris

Sorry, I do not quite understand the question.

Chair

The cohort of women who we are dealing with now, particularly 50-plus, perhaps did have opportunities to have mid-career reviews and, your argument would be, more access to further education, but they are still in that position where they are suffering an enormous pay gap. Those changes are relatively recent.

Scarlet Harris

They are relatively recent changes but if we are talking about a cohort of women who are currently in their 40s working in retail, possibly have taken some time out, were possibly not in retail before having children but are doing a job in a relatively low paid sector because they took a career break and were unable to get into the sector they were in before, actually having adult education and FE training courses available to them would enable them to make a change—the kinds of change that the mid-life career review might suggest or signpost them towards training that they could then undertake in order to do a different job.

Christopher Brooks

It is not just about saying that we need more government funding; it is about trying to find new ways of allowing the training to exist that meets people’s needs. The apprenticeship programme is a good example of where, because there has been so much emphasis on it, it does to an extent do that. With older people particularly, there is a big gap and we need to look at how employers can contribute to training for on-the-job and, as Anna mentioned earlier, for progression as well. There needs to be some kind of way of reinvigorating investment in training, which has fallen off from all sides in the past decade or so. That will help meet a lot of needs. The labour market has changed so much over the last 20 or 30 years and now people frequently move jobs. Therefore, people frequently need to retrain. It becomes increasingly important that people can update their skills and it is not done on the basis of any kind of stereotypes about people wanting to keep working or to progress in work.

Chair

I feel we have run out of time, which is a shame, because we could have continued our conversation well into the afternoon. Can I thank you, on behalf of all of the Committee, for coming along today and also for all of the evidence that you have already submitted to us in writing? It was an incredibly helpful session. Thank you very much for your time. Oral evidence: Gender pay gap, HC 584 16