Oral evidence: Gender Pay Gap, HC 584Tuesday 26 January 2016

Oral evidence, 26 January 2016.

Witnesses

Helen Fairfoul, Chief Executive, Universities and Colleges Employers Association, Emma Stewart, Joint Chief Executive Officer, Timewise Foundation, and Claire Turner, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, gave evidence.

Chair

Good morning—yes, still good morning, just about. Can I thank you very much indeed for coming in to be our second set of witnesses in this evidence session today? Colleagues have just gone out for a quick natural break, but they will join us in a second. I am keen to use every moment we have. I know you are all very busy people. Thank you very much for taking time out to come and be with us today. It is a very generous use of your time. It is an important evidence session for us and we are really keen to get further insight into the work you have done in these areas. Before we start off with our questioning, can I just ask you to briefly give your name and the organisation that you represent, starting with Claire?

Claire Turner

My name is Claire Turner, and I work for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Helen Fairfoul

My name is Helen Fairfoul. I am the Chief Executive of the Universities and Colleges Employers Association.

Emma Stewart

I am Emma Stewart and I am Joint Chief Executive of The Timewise Foundation.

Chair

Our first set of questioning is from Ben.

Ben Howlett

It is lovely to put names to faces, by the way, because I have read some of your work in relation to a debate I hosted last week on increasing diversity in STEM careers as well. Thank you very much; it did help a lot. The first set of questions relate to Higher Education and we have seen an awful lot of work from Athena SWAN and the benefits of what Athena SWAN has been doing in closing the pay gap within STEM subjects. The UCU have shown that female professors earn about 6.3%, or roughly £5,000, less than their male counterparts, which are pretty shocking figures. Having said that, that is still slightly less than in other careers and the work going on in higher education is changing the tide on this. The question I have for you is: why is the gender pay gap falling more rapidly in higher education than in other sectors?

Helen Fairfoul

Why is it falling rapidly? I would point to perhaps a few things. Equal pay auditing has been embedded as habitual practice in the HE sector for many years now. Attention has been paid to the issues around equal pay. The big push for that, for our sector, was the introduction of new pay and grading arrangements through the framework agreement, which was way back in 2004-05. Its implementation led to across-the-board evaluation of roles and the commitment to deliver equal pay for work of equal value. I would emphasise that equal pay is not the same as the gender pay gap. I know you have, of course, explored that already in your evidence sessions. It is a starting point for an employer to have an interest and to be prepared to do the analysis, to look at where there are discrepancies, and to ask questions. Having done the equal pay work, I would say that our employers have by and large taken an interest, and that is because they have, perhaps, a particular commitment around social justice to take these issues seriously in universities. There is a huge interest from their own workforce and students in what they are doing to deliver on the social justice agenda. They have then said, “Women are not progressing necessarily; we still have gender pay gap issues”, and they have moved into a mode where they are action planning and taking steps—where it is within their capability as employers to take steps to make a difference. That has been happening over many years. It is not a job done—it is slow work—but it is good to see progress.

Ben Howlett

Claire or Emma, do you see a difference?

Emma Stewart

It is not a sector that we are expert in, but generally we see gender pay gaps reducing in sectors where there are more opportunities for women to work part-time and more flexibly. As you will know from the evidence that has been given, the gender pay gap is greatest when there is a distinction between full-time and part-time. Our view is it is more about an issue relating to the nature of part-time work than gender, although obviously more women choose and elect to work part-time and, as a result, often compromise on pay, because part-time is generally clustered in lower paid roles. At the core of this is a conversation about job design. Certainly we have seen in the educational sector, FE/HE, the way jobs are done often facilitates more flexibility, which creates more opportunities for women, which we would assume may contribute to why there is less of a gender pay gap.

Claire Turner

As an organisation we are very focused on the bottom end of the labour market, so all of our research that is relevant to this debate is very much focused on low-income sectors. Helen and Emma are probably much better placed to answer that question than I am.

Ben Howlett

I will come on to you a bit later on then, Claire, thank you. Do you see a difference—this is particularly to Helen—between the arts and the STEM sectors within HE? I will give you an example. I went to a university, and I will save them their blushes, and it was a shock to me to find that the English department did not have a single senior female academic in post. Whilst that is rare in terms of arts versus STEM, do you see there is a big difference there?

Helen Fairfoul

There clearly are differences endemic throughout the economy that are reflected in the choices that women make around their careers and subjects. It is, sadly, the fact that many fewer girls and women are choosing careers in STEM subjects—or have been historically. It is taking time to make a difference. You are now seeing more women studying for medicine. It will take a bit of time for those women to outnumber the men as consultants in the profession, sadly, but that is a feature. Certainly the work that we were committed to doing in looking in more detail at the sector’s gender pay gap is to look at issues around discipline and occupation, because we want to understand that better.

Ben Howlett

Opening up the question more to Claire and Emma, what other sectors could learn from what is going on in higher education at the moment? I know it is quite difficult, given the fact that you might not necessarily know much about the higher education sector, but, before you answer that question, have you seen what is going on in Athena SWAN and higher education?

Emma Stewart

I know a little bit about it, but where we see greatest traction with employers is on a B2B, sector-to-sector-led conversation. We do less to influence employers across sectors. That often plays to employers’ need for competitive advantage. This is about a conversation about access to talent and retention and progression of talent. Certainly, in terms of engaging business in thinking about gender pay gap issues and how to create a diverse workforce, if you bring employers together who are from the same sector with some who are making an impact, that often, from our experience, can create traction. There is an opportunity to look sector to sector, but you need to be really clear about what fundamental structural issues within the sector can be compared. There is often an assumption—and we certainly do this with public and private sector organisations—that it is okay for them over there because they are in the public sector and therefore they have X, Y or Z, or it is okay for them in the private sector because they have lots of money. You have to be really clear on what the core comparators are in order to do that sort of work.

Ben Howlett

Helen, the last question is directed to you: what would you say are the pros and cons of widening out the Athena SWAN-type programme or research funding dependent on diversity credentials to other sectors within HE other than just the STEM area?

Helen Fairfoul

Interestingly, Athena SWAN already has widened out beyond STEM. The sector took the steps to do that. Interestingly, we find institutions are saying that, if they are tackling Athena SWAN because of their desire to address this for Department of Health research funding, which was the one lever for pushing Athena SWAN, it is affecting practice across the whole institution. If you are trying to achieve Athena SWAN for the whole university, you will look at practice across the whole institution, so it is having that effect anyway, and it is widening. One or two institutions have voluntarily extended it and developed the model so that it can be applied to the arts and the humanities. That is kind of happening. You asked whether it is the right approach; it is an approach. Kitemarking approaches have positive and negative elements to them. A negative side is that organisations can become very focused on trying to achieve the Kitemark and put huge resources into that, instead of the resources that they could be putting into fantastic mentoring schemes or return-from-caring-responsibility grants and things like that, which would make much more difference on the ground. We have also seen that really effective practice can be delivered in institutions without Athena SWAN. It is about leadership and it is about the culture from the top of the organisation.

Ben Howlett

Do you think that is something missing from Athena SWAN and potentially could be the next steps of Athena SWAN?

Helen Fairfoul

What in particular?

Ben Howlett

In terms of avoiding the Kitemark-type certificate in the window, but saying there need to be more mentoring programmes and encouraging more people who have ended up taking caring responsibilities to get back into the workplace. Athena SWAN sort of goes into Athena SWAN part two, rather than just focusing on part one.

Helen Fairfoul

Yes. I do not know. I come back to organisations having to feel the motivation to want to make a difference. I am not altogether convinced that the nature of whatever badging mechanism may apply in a sector is the answer. When we did our case study work, we were very interested to look beyond the sector. We looked at a financial services company, who were doing fantastic stuff. They were doing stuff that the HE sector could learn from. Athena SWAN has not delivered all the answers.

Emma Stewart

In terms of accreditation or Kitemarks we, as an organisation, run an accreditation programme for local authorities to help them get better at flexibility in order to retain and attract women and men. We have found the way to entice them is, first and foremost, the business case. They need to understand why it is good for them to do it. It is good for them from a brand perspective; they have to compete with private sector businesses. It is good for them because their attrition levels will go down. It is good for them because they need to close buildings sometimes and people need to work in different places. I absolutely agree that it is about the leadership case and the business case, and understanding the culture change you need to make to get to a Kitemark or some form of accreditation, but starting with a Kitemark or accreditation without doing that work does not necessarily sustain change.

Ben Howlett

Claire, I see you nodding.

Claire Turner

Yes. Our work in this area is looking at how organisations can become anti-poverty employers, and that is certainly about establishing the business case and thinking about champions in the organisation, but also this managerial and leadership support. Again, these are the three common themes that have come up for us in terms of trying to engage businesses in thinking about particular agendas.

Jo Churchill

Within this data, what worries me is that it has come to my notice that for most senior jobs you have to have a certain level of qualification. For example, to start on the lectureship circuit, they usually want your PhD, but that usually coincides with when you are going to start your family. I have knowledge of a lot of people who find parts of the profession excluded or it becomes a lot more longwinded, because they look at flexible working or whatever, to get into those higher echelons or those areas that are better paid. Fine, we are looking at the gender pay gap, but there is a discrete discrimination going on against women that this masks. I would just be interested, Helen, in whether that structural issue is there and how we overcome it. If we do not, you do not get women up the ladder.

Helen Fairfoul

Interestingly, there are models of leadership that question whether women are getting to senior appointments across all kinds of sectors, including higher education, that are more fundamental than whether they have a PhD, to be honest. There are definitely issues around women taking options around flexibility and careers, and I would strike a note of caution. I recognise that jobs that facilitate flexibility are absolutely crucial, but you can also look at that as a double-edged sword. Again, it is interesting how the financial services company that we looked at had taken such positive steps to really work at valuing people who worked flexibility, because it can carry a whole load of baggage with it. Also, if women are getting into academic careers, they are well represented in the junior echelons of the academic career, so I do not think the doctorate is an entry bar; it is whether or not they are progressing, and that is why so much work is being done in institutions to look at what we have done to support those careers.

Mr Shuker

Obviously, the purpose of these evidence sessions is to provide evidence about the scale of the problem but also recommendations about the solutions. I am going to ask a couple of basic questions, just to get it on the record. Many of the witnesses that we have had have talked about solutions to the gender pay gap in well paid or more flexible occupations but low pay is an area that we really need to drill into. First of all, what do you think are the problem-child, low-paid sectors—highly gendered but low pay with a significant gender pay gap, perhaps alongside other sectors? Claire, I think you looked at one in quite a lot of detail.

Claire Turner

Yes. The key low-paid sectors we focus on are care, retail and hospitality. For us, when thinking about sectors that are highly feminised, care is the number one from our perspective, but we are aware that retail and hospitality also employ plenty of women.

Mr Shuker

You are recognising there that there is effectively a gender pay gap with other professions that involve equal skill levels, rather than a big gender pay gap within care, for example?

Claire Turner

Yes.

Mr Shuker

Thanks. That is really helpful. What projects have been shown to improve the outcomes for closing that gender pay gap in low pay?

Claire Turner

Some of the evidence is really interesting. We have been doing a lot thinking about issues like career development and looking at the evidence base around that, but particularly around low-paid sectors. The evidence is quite weak from the demand side of things. There is some evidence from some initiatives that have happened in the US that are about trying to think about how we can encourage people in low-paid jobs and create career pathways and progression pathways. They have tended to try to focus on the business case—why a business would do this—and incidentally are very much focused on things like skills shortages and retaining staff as the key driver. They have also used a lot of intermediaries who are trying to support these individuals to think about career progression but also to try to look at the pathways for business. We do have some examples from the US, which is probably the best evidence that we have, but certainly there is more that we could do in the UK in thinking about developing and supporting some of these schemes.

Mr Shuker

Claire, with your work particularly on the care profession, what led you to make the recommendations that you did about how to improve low pay within the sector?

Claire Turner

The challenge with the care sector is that the opportunities for progression currently are very limited and not always particularly attractive to care workers. We know that if you are a care assistant maybe working towards a senior care assistant, the next step on the promotion ladder, if there even is one, is something that is not going to give you much more money and might bring a lot more stress and less flexibility. We feel that trying to create these career-development ladders under the current system is not necessarily something that would be achievable. We need to think about supporting career progression on frontline roles, rather than thinking that progression is all about becoming a manager of others delivering frontline. It is: how can we create better jobs that are working on the frontline? We know from the care sector, which is very different from hospitality and retail, people’s motivations for entering the profession. It is wanting to do that direct work with older people or adults with needs. There are huge challenges with something like career-progression ladders, but certainly it is an area we need to look at, if we are going to think about that. The other area is thinking a lot more about the quality of jobs. We have done research that is looking at the links between pay and quality of care, for example. We know that pay is really important and that increasing people’s pay is something that we need to do. There are also other areas about improvements to job quality that are also highly valued by staff working in that sector. There is certainly the idea of increasing pay to the living wage but, alongside that, thinking a lot about the terms and conditions and the job quality of people in those roles is equally as important.

Mr Shuker

We do very poorly at the moment—this country—around productivity. A lot of that is driven by what is going on in the low-pay sector. Do you think there are practical recommendations we might make that might help productivity as well as helping with the gender pay gap?

Claire Turner

One of our ideas is very much trying to think about industrial strategies for low-paid sectors. We know that we can create industrial strategies for high tech, advanced engineering, but we do not do the same for low pay. If you took care as a sector, we would feel that would be a priority area for an industrial strategy. The things that are linked to productivity in those service sectors are things around workforce development. For us, thinking at scale about this in terms of an industrial strategy for these sectors would be a way of linking workforce development and pressure with productivity.

Emma Stewart

We have run a number of projects to look at how we can progress low-paid workers in our organisation. There is not a lot of evidence because there has not been a lot of investment in this area of work; people do not invest in low-paid workers. For us, there are a number of points. On the productivity point, we recently published some research that showed there are about 1.9 million people in the UK at the moment who are underemployed or overqualified for jobs because they are trapped in low-paid, part-time work. They have skills that are underutilised. In our view, they are trapped for a number of reasons. Some people are trapped because of a lack of skills. However, these 1.9 million people have the skills to earn a quality job; what they need is flexibility. The solution is to look at how we can unlock more better paid jobs to suit how they need to work. The challenge is that, if you look at how people work and how people work on a job-design perspective, you often have two ways that people move into part-time or flexible jobs. One is because you are in a sector where that is how work is done—retail, hospitality or care—and the second is because an individual has asked for or negotiated it, which is often in an office in an admin job or something like that. The job started full-time; often a woman would come back from maternity leave and say, “Can I work three days a week?” If you look at how many job vacancies are currently advertised in the job market open to flexibility at a quality level, which we would set at about £19,500, there is only 6.2%. We have 96% of businesses saying they offer some sort of flexible working, but only 6.2% of jobs are, from day one, advertised with a reference to, “This job can be done on a part-time and flexible basis”. For those 1.9 million people, the problem is they cannot move up in their organisations, particularly if you look at retail. We have done some work in retail, because the next level up is managerial and that means it is full-time and there is no paid overtime. If you look out, there is nothing else to apply for because you are only fishing in a pool of 6.2% of job vacancies. You get trapped by your need, as a woman, to work in a part-time or flexible way. For us, the solution is to look at job design. We have done a piece of work with Pets at Home and we are in it at the moment, through UKCES, to effectively take women off the shop floor. What Pets at Home have done is redesigned managerial and assistant manager jobs to be done on a job share, part-time or flexible basis. They have a great training programme. They have great women, but the women’s attrition rates are poor. They are losing women. The business case is that they need to keep good skills, and the way to do that is not to invest in training—they do not need to—but to take the next-level-up job and make that flexible. The evidence from the States shows that most people, at the moment, progress in businesses by leaving them and going to another job somewhere else. There are a number of issues and a number of ways to address this. One is to look at how we can persuade employers who are currently advertising a full-time, decent quality job, to consider it on a flexible basis from day one. How can we work with low-pay sectors to help them think about career progression routes that are based on a job-design intervention, not just a skills intervention, because they will have skilled people in their organisations?

Mr Shuker

Briefly, Emma, on that, is the current 26 weeks’ provision around requesting flexible working a barrier practically, in your opinion, to employers considering making it flexible from day one?

Emma Stewart

It does not have to be a barrier. We work with lots of businesses who have understood the business case for what we would term flexible hiring. They can see, again, if you are only 6% of vacancies out there, if they voluntarily say, “We are open to a conversation about flexibility for the right candidate”, they will attract far more people. It is not a barrier, but you have to incentivise and encourage them, and present the business case. The business case is that 1.9 million people with skills are currently trapped in low pay, but there are 14 million people who we have estimated want flexibility in their next job. That is not just women; that is men as well. There is an issue here about taking this away from a conversation about gender and taking it into a conversation about how work is done.

Chair

To what extent are you seeing any changes here as we get higher levels of employment, so with a shortage of labour?

Emma Stewart

The other pilot that we have just recently completed is on universal credit for DWP. That was very much a different model. That was not an employer “Damn, let’s look at career progression”; that was, “Let’s take a pool of candidates who are potentially going to fall under conditionality and help them get a better job”. Candidates have more leverage when you have a jobs market like we have at the moment. Employers are certainly more open to the conversation because they need to compete harder for talent, even at the lower levels. One of the best things you can do and what worked in the pilots that we ran, which was taking a group of women in low pay and getting them better jobs, was to broker on behalf of the candidate to the employer to say, not dissimilar to a Jobcentre Plus model, “I have great candidates. I can give you them for free, but would you consider flexing the way the job is done”. That is not to say, “You are advertising a job five days a week—go part-time”. That is just to say the start time, end time and a bit from home. In most instances, having seen the candidate’s CV, the employer said yes. The challenge is that it is hard to have that conversation when an employer is not faced with a good candidate, so you have to make it very real. But the problem we have is the way the current employment skills system, and certainly JCP, works is that it does not do that kind of brokerage. That requires a career advancement service. That requires a different kind of level of skill and conversation with employers on behalf of candidates.

Mr Shuker

Emma, you said something very important before, which is that we are trying to make an assessment, particularly in the three low-paid sectors we were just talking about there, as to what we can do to improve outcomes. You seem to suggest that, if you worked a bit, you could provide, even in those sectors, more flexible working than most employers think about right now. Is that your assessment?

Emma Stewart

Not quite; I am saying there are lots of other sectors where there are latent opportunities for intermediary level jobs to be done on a flexible basis, so for people to move out of those sectors and to move into, say, an admin or an office job. When you look at those sectors specifically, if you break it down, we have an issue with social care, which is that there is little we can do without further investment because—and I would agree with what Claire said—the sector itself is really struggling. It has nothing to invest. We can think about how we can make jobs better for the people in those sectors, but there are very flat progression structures. In domiciliary care, you have 16 people managed by one person, so there is very little place to go. We have to be a bit open to saying, “Look at the sector. Is there an opportunity for progression? If not, how can we help people to move somewhere else?” That is about thinking about the recruitment market more broadly. In retail there are opportunities and we are testing that, and similarly with hospitality. There are some really interesting, informal progression routes that happen in hospitality between hotels. You start your career in a Travelodge and potentially move into a Hilton, but we do not talk to businesses enough about how those work.

Mr Shuker

Helen, in your evidence just now you were talking about an entry level to academia, for example. There is not that big a gap in terms of representation, but as you get higher up within management it dissipates. What strategies do you think could be effectively employed to make sure we have more women coming through into higher paid managerial careers?

Helen Fairfoul

The strategies that we have highlighted as positive practices that employers can address are around encouraging women to think about where they are taking their careers, to positively mentor their career advancement, role models of flexible working at senior levels and showing that people who are working flexibly can really deliver the goods whereas managers might see them as problematic. Those are the kinds of initiatives that we have described going on in institutions and they are starting to make a difference. It is always very hard to evaluate one initiative as being the one that made a difference. There is a range of them and other things are going on at the same time. Not everything is in the gift of employers. I would also say, and it is really interesting listening to my colleagues in this evidence session, because of the focus on women getting into professorial roles, for example, our sector has not been that good at looking at the lower graded roles. One of the reasons we still have a big number as a gender pay gap is because of the predominance of women in lower graded roles in our institutions, and there is not that much being done in thinking about helping women advance from those positions.

Claire Turner

It is a really interesting point. In some ways, some of this is getting to the basics. We are talking about these career progression schemes, and that, for me, feels like an ideal. However, we did some research recently with low-paid workers asking them what would improve their working lives, and their expectations of their employers were pretty low. They were saying first and foremost it was pay and thinking about things like the living wage. Secondly, it was recognising their time more fairly, so saying, “Pay sick pay beyond the statutory”, and, in care, particularly travel costs, paid breaks, and support with additional costs like transport and child care. Some of this feels, to me, like there are some basics to get right to start with. On a secondary level, they were talking very much about the stuff that is about HR management. They were talking about communication and being involved in making decisions, and initiatives that could improve their lives outside of work, so certainly flexibility and security were the two big issues from low-paid workers’ perspectives. It is really important. I am sure everybody has been saying the same thing throughout this evidence process, but just to keep going back to some of this stuff, particularly for low-paid sectors, it is about the basics.

Mr Shuker

Is there any evidence that membership of a trade union, or any development by trade unions at the moment, helps or assists women in terms of pay through collective pay bargaining or through working with their rights to make sure they get progression? Has someone looked at that?

Claire Turner

We have not looked at that so I cannot comment.

Mr Shuker

Do you think the general approach in these highly gendered, low-pay sectors, with relatively flat structures, should be for us to try to change the shape of them so there is more of a mix of managerial and shop floor etc., or do you think it is about valuing those professions much more and trying to lift the entire sector up so that it has more parity, perhaps, with other professions that are highly gendered by men?

Claire Turner

There is something fundamental about the value we place on care. That is very well debated in the care sector and beyond. There is something absolutely fundamental about the value that we place on our care services. We have done plenty of work looking at things like what it would cost and what the benefits are of paying all care workers a living wage and we have tried to look at ways to fund that. It just comes back to the same issue of the underfunding of care. I feel there is something very fundamental about the value that we place particularly on care.

Chair

I am very keen on your question around productivity; to what extent have you looked at the role of technology in trying to assist productivity in low-paid and low-skilled areas?

Emma Stewart

We have done a little bit of work to understand it, not to influence it. In low-paid sectors you have standardised shift practices, and there are a lot of tools on the market to help businesses to structure shift patterns and do scheduling effectively. We have seen they can do a lot, but they are only as good as the people who programme them. That takes you back into a conversation about how managers manage work and how they structure work. At the moment, the challenge is that there is a bit of a disconnect between the value of technology and how it can be utilised to effect more productive job design.

Chair

Are there any other comments on the use of technology or access to technology, not only in the low-paid sector but also, Helen maybe, in the academic sector? Is that an issue or not?

Helen Fairfoul

I do not have much I can give you on that. It has not really been identified as an issue. Skills, in terms of the ability of people to interact with technology, have been addressed by some employers. It is basic skills development, along with language development sometimes at the lower levels of the workforce.

Claire Turner

I would probably echo what Emma said, in that I do not think we are far enough ahead in trying to understand the role of technology in some of these sectors, certainly in our experience of care. There is a lack of investment in thinking about technology in those sectors.

Chair

That goes back to your industrial strategy.

Ruth Cadbury

Sticking with care, which is one of the most people-based professions, everyone I know who has ever worked in care says that the people they care for and the jobs they do and the places they go to is not the problem; the problem is their supervisor. Is the flat structure of something like 16 people to one supervisor in itself leading to the productivity and inequality issues that we often find in care? Maybe looking at that might be a solution and create a bit more career progression than there is at present. There is a strong case—and I do not know how far it has been developed since I last looked—for small groups of carers working on an almost co-operative basis and sharing the work out among themselves. Are those some of the issues we could explore in terms of productivity and career progression?

Emma Stewart

We are doing a bit of work on that at the moment in East London. There is a really interesting model in Europe called the Buurtzorg model, which is exactly that. One of the challenges of being in a low-paid job, as you say, is that you do not have autonomy. You are responsible to your manager and you do not have control over your hours and how you work. You often have very good ideas about how you can make it better, but you do not have a voice. The idea of, particularly as more local authorities look at different models for care, building a co-operative whereby you have a pool of care workers who are effectively managing between them the way that they deliver work we think has real potential. It is not necessarily to enhance progression opportunities but just to make the jobs better, because the unpredictability of shifts is a huge issue. We think there is something around compatible flexibility, because the challenge with “flexible” is, as Helen says, it has lots of negative connotations, which is that it is all on the individual and not for the employer. We need to reframe what we mean, which is where this works well with other organisations. In fact, if you can be flexible to the employer but also maintain the flexibility that you need so you have control over it, ultimately it would suggest that we could have more efficient and productive teams. We are trialling some work, but there is an opportunity there because it takes us into the debate around zero hours’. It means you have more control and then you can plan. The business case for that is you are more likely to stay in the job, because a lot of women want to work in care; they value the profession. They just need the terms and the working practices to be better.

Claire Turner

It is a really interesting area and I have heard people put forward this co-operative kind of idea as almost one that might be the only way that you could sustain domiciliary care in the future, in terms of trying to make it sustainable and make it work. It is new and we do not have much evidence around that in terms of how it might work if you scaled it. When it comes to care managers, all our research on carers’ work has come down to the manager’s role being absolutely pivotal in people’s satisfaction at work and all the issues that we know about. It really feels like the role of a care manager in a care home is absolutely pivotal. While the co-operative idea is really interesting, it feels quite niche and quite small scale, and something that we could test and pilot, but also there is a route to thinking about professionalising care and the role of care managers much more. There is not a professional body. There are not standards. There is perhaps a lot to learn from health in that respect. For more of a mainstream, short-term option, there is something about the professionalising of care managers as well.

Mims Davies

I am not sure there is much left on that in terms of questioning, unless I have missed anything.

Chair

Generally, is there anything else you wanted to add in terms of flexible working? We are going to have a series of questions on flexible working, and Mims is right that we have covered a lot of it.

Mims Davies

Picking up on something with Claire, do you think the care sphere would benefit if people were able to negotiate better with their employers as family members to support the care industry better so, for example, people are able to stay in their jobs longer and support family members alongside the carers? It is certainly something that I found quite frustrating when looking after family members. Because of a lack of technology, for example, regarding what medicines were being taken etc., quite often a lot of time was spent just communicating things. It seemed mad to me that Ocado could send me an email saying I needed washing machine powder, but if I need a certain medicine for family members there could not be a list of when that was last given and whether it was suitable with something else that a specialist was giving. Sometimes not having the flexibility for people who are doing jobs but want to be there to support the care around their family is a frustration. Perhaps that would mean that care overall was valued better by people doing that role and also who are assisting families by doing that role.

Claire Turner

Absolutely, it is a big issue. I am certainly thinking about how we underestimate the role of family carers in providing care. It is not always about mum living in the family home. We are just thinking about the different ways that people support their family members now. It is certainly an area where technology could help. We may be able to find examples of where that is already happening perhaps in care services across the country, and it is trying to share some of the practice about what is possible. We are uncovering some really great practice out there. There is a movement called My Home Life, which is a really positive movement around promoting social care. There are really good examples out there and we could do more to promote what is possible within the current system to try to show people that there are other organisations doing this, so certainly I would echo that balancing of care and work is a massive issue for people we talk to.

Emma Stewart

It is back to basics; we have seen with some care providers often the challenge is, if you want to move into care as an employee, when you get employed by an organisation all the best shifts that fit around family life are taken by the people who have been there for a while. As new employees, moving into an organisation, you have the nights and the really early mornings. It is very practically prohibitive. People often leave very quickly, so the churn is massive. You effectively have to take away from someone to give to others. Again, that comes back to managerial skill and expertise in managing how work is done. The challenge we have is that we do not invest in supporting managers to think about job design and that kind of work. I would argue that there is a role here regionally for LEPs to play, because they are supposed to have a demand-side employer-driven function of thinking about low-paid sectors and investing in how to support low-paid sectors where there is not enough inward investment, to help their managers to think more creatively and differently, and to align with the use of technology and things that we have talked about. The sector itself has no capacity to invest in it and to invest in its own managers. That is an opportunity that is not being addressed at a regional level.

Mims Davies

Do you think, just to follow up on that, that the LEPs should be looking at flexibility and lower paid jobs, rather than just this higher level of business that they perhaps feel more comfortable in?

Emma Stewart

There is a huge conversation with LEPs about inclusive growth. That is linked to the conversation we just had about productivity. That it is about looking at how they can influence employers to think about different strategies and to support a range of different people who are either locked out or locked down in work because they need to work in a different way. That is not just women. That is older people and people with health issues or disabilities. The challenge at the moment is that the LEP model is very much, certainly in some areas, focused on careers and young people. Life-stage careers are critical for women. If you have dropped out of work because you have had children or are older and looking to stay in work because you may have a pensions issue later on, having support regionally and locally from a careers service is critical. At the moment, LEPs just focus on apprenticeships. We would certainly argue that talking to employers about flexible hiring and job design is just as important for a different demographic of people, but those conversations are not being had.

Mims Davies

Is there a PR war that the Government needs to have with employers in terms of flexible working, i.e. that it is not seen as some kind of cop out? Is that the crux of this problem?

Emma Stewart

There is a very positive story to tell. We have talked about stories and case studies. We have very positive examples of people who are able to work at the top of their game in a different way. We produce the Power Part Time List every year, which has the top 50 people in the country who work in executive roles. The Chief Economist at Lloyds Bank does a four-day week because he does Ironman training on his fifth day. It does not have to be necessarily because of caring responsibilities. We have to de-feminise the conversation about flexibility and get it out there—destigmatise it so it becomes more of a positive thing to do. We have to persuade businesses that if they want to be forward thinking they can get access to a far wider pool of talent. Unfortunately, the narrative at the moment is very much about underemployment and part-time being a bad thing, whereas three-quarters of the people working part-time choose to. The problem is they are compromising on pay.

Mr Shuker

As you can tell, I do Ironman training on my fifth day as well. The Committee will debate what recommendations we should make to the Government. Just regards to the conversation we have had around low pay, what do you think is the Government’s responsibility? What should the Government do? There is a role for the individual and there is a role for the employer, but what should be mandated by Government that would make a difference to this?

Emma Stewart

We have some very specific thoughts. From the DWP’s perspective we need to think about how JCP talks to employers and what the NEST team does, and there needs to be some education about advising employers on different kinds of jobs and how people need to be recruited. From a BIS perspective, if universal credit is going to work, we need a narrative that is not about saying, “You just have to work more hours to get out of low pay”. It is about getting a higher hourly rate of pay, but we need investment in the careers advancement service in order for that to happen, which has some ability to talk to employers in a different way. We would say more broadly—certainly at the regional level—there needs to be a LEP focus on the wider understanding of the structural nature of the jobs market to facilitate people in low pay and, more broadly, a different narrative about the benefits of a different kind of job market to influence employers. There are some very nuts and bolts, tangible things linked to universal credit that are quite fundamentally critical right now and we need to look at.

Mr Shuker

Helen, would you like to comment?

Helen Fairfoul

I have just a quick comment. There is something that the Government is doing, and that is introducing a national living wage. I know there is also a voluntary living wage that is higher, but a lot of employers are looking long and hard at the implications of that. In our sector, they are looking longer term at national living wage, but looking at living wage, and that is forcing employers into rethinking productivity, job design and tiers of jobs in the lower sections of the workforce. In some ways that intervention will prompt some much more imaginative thinking because it will have to, because otherwise there will be a bigger productivity problem because we will just be paying more money and not getting anything more in terms of productivity. Because of the looseness at the bottom end of the labour market, we have downplayed those skills we need in those roles and not recognised the abilities and potential of people in our workforces. We will start to look at that more. It is certainly going to happen in higher education. Roles will be reviewed. Do we need these tiers of supervisors telling people what to do when they are probably quite capable of organising themselves?

Claire Turner

Just to reiterate, our idea of an industrial strategy for low-paid sectors is Government working in partnership with those sectors. Certainly thinking about the career development framework, there is a role for Government there. We think that with a lot of these things, when you look at things like the labour market, local economies and local populations, they differ very dramatically. Whilst there is a role for national government to be the lead and to drive some of this, a lot of what needs to happen needs to happen locally and be relevant to those local job markets and populations. There is certainly a role for LEPs in some of that career development. In terms of the living wage, there is still an opportunity to promote the voluntary living wage and a key role for the public sector to take a lead in that. We can see good examples in terms of the Scottish Government or the Mayor of London’s office, which have already taken the lead in terms of being voluntary living wage and accredited employers, and not only paying their staff directly the living wage but thinking about the living wage in their contracting and procurement. There is a leadership role on pay that the public sector needs to take.

Mr Shuker

On care, you called for regulation rather than just inspection in your report. Could you just reiterate what you thought that regulation should be?

Claire Turner

We have talked a lot about the CQC. I will call them the regulator, but we think in a lot of ways they inspect rather than regulate. Certainly some of the issues that we think are really important around pay, progression, funding for care, in terms of transparency of what people pay for care, are the things we think could helpfully be part of a regulatory system. We think that this happens in other sectors and we really need to bring some other things in there, but also to think about how, at the moment, the system places that responsibility entirely on the care home, for example, and the role for commissioners and regulators when we are thinking about fee levels, for example. It is trying to involve the whole system in regulation and not placing everything on the care home providers themselves.

Emma Stewart

There is a role for Government in leading by example in terms of how it employs, recruits and progresses people and also thinking about supply chains. We have not talked about procurement but there is a really big opportunity here to explore how you can persuade an employer to change its recruitment practices, for example.

Chair

We are going to move on to procurement fairly shortly. Before we do that, can I just ask one further thing about flexibility? This came up in our earlier session. What is part-time working? Is part-time working five hours a week, 25 hours a week or 30 hours a week? To what extent do we need to change the way we talk about jobs to assist? I was thinking particularly about some earlier evidence we had heard about the prevalence of agile working among men, which seemed to be higher, particularly among older men, in comparison with women. To be slightly simplistic: is agile working what men talk about when women take on part-time working?

Emma Stewart

Terminology is a huge barrier. You have agile, fluid, part-time, flexible. There is a whole range of terms to make it land better. We would say that the best way to approach this is to look at it on a spectrum; you can have flexibility on task, place and time, and how much. Our part-time is probably the equivalent to Finland’s full-time because of the hours. Full-time working in Scandinavian countries is much more prevalent because there are boundaries and we are not working ridiculously long hours. Most women returners still prefer the option of part-time, as in less work, than flexible, but we have to explain the spectrum of this. For businesses to engage there need to be opportunities to consider home working, part-time working and full-time but with different start and end times, because it has to work for business as well as for individuals. In a way we have to just accept that there is a lot of different terminology, but often the best person to tell you how work can be done on a flexible basis is a flexible worker, because they have already done it.

Ruth Cadbury

On procurement, particularly in the public sector, do you have examples of strategies that have worked and where the next pressure should be to get further changes?

Emma Stewart

The programme that we work with local authorities, Timewise Councils, which is an accreditation programme, requires them to take a leadership role explicitly on flexibility, but part of that is to require them to take action with their suppliers and through procurement. We have 15 councils across the UK that have been through the programme. Some are now starting to have a direct influence. Procurement is hard in terms of EU regulations, but they are doing very practical things like providing workforce guidance to their suppliers to encourage them to understand the business case for designing jobs differently. It is a bit of a win-win for local authorities, because if you can be more efficient in the way that you design your jobs, you can deliver more efficient services. That is starting to filter through to suppliers, changing their behaviour. From a hard procurement perspective, we have done some work with local authorities to influence PQQs to encourage them to submit what they plan to do in relation to low pay and job design. It is in the early stages but we are hoping that will have some traction.

Ruth Cadbury

There is an overuse of PQQs anyway; they do not need to be used nearly as much as they are.

Emma Stewart

Exactly.

Claire Turner

I do not have a lot of detail on this but we are aware that the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments have frameworks in place about how best to use procurement for social impact. I should think there is something that England could learn from the work that is already going on in some of the other devolved countries. I am not sure how much evidence we have of what works yet, but we are working with the key anchor institutions in the Leeds City Region to really think about their procurement practices and how, again, they could have a social impact. I am not sure we have strong evidence coming through from that just yet.

Ruth Cadbury

It is not a complete overlap but there must be some analysis of the true national living wage accredited employers. There must be some work there about the impact they have had. Certainly my local authority, as a living wage employer, is also a living wage contractor, because the two go hand-in-hand.

Emma Stewart

They are probably in the minority. Our sense is that it is work in progress. Some are doing really good work but there is still quite a lot of work to be done to ensure that the procured services and employers pay the living wage as well. It is a challenge. On the Social Value Act, it is challenging because it does not have a huge amount of teeth. We need some really good examples, again, of the business case, but also it is about the scoring mechanisms within procurement. If you are going to have a Social Value Act, you have to weight judgments based on proper social value. There are some great examples but, again, I am not sure quite how much traction it is getting with larger facilities companies, for example.

Chair

We have been grappling with zero hours’ contracts and the need to feel that they are protecting people in the way they should and giving them what they want. We are finding it difficult to find any ways of improving zero hours’ contracts or concrete examples of how they could be improved. Would you like to offer any evidence to the Committee on that today? It is slightly separate to what we have been discussing, but I could not resist taking this opportunity to press you for your expertise on that.

Emma Stewart

We have seen them work where there is transparency and good planning in relation to being clear when work is booked in and when work can be done, and that it is agreeable on both sides, with the individual and the employer. It does not work—and there are examples in hospitality, and all sectors—where work is taken away or given at very short notice. There are some examples and, again, with a local authority we have worked with within children’s services we have seen some good progression opportunities out of zero hours’ and into permanent work, but it has been managed really effectively by the employer. There is an anxiety that all zero hours’ contracts are bad, and we would not necessarily say that was the case.

Chair

Transparency and notice on hours.

Emma Stewart

Yes.

Chair

That is really helpful. Is there anything else?

Claire Turner

There should be much more autonomy. In terms of some of the problems with zero hours’ contracts, there are things around maybe banning exclusivity clauses, thinking about ensuring all staff on zero hours’ contracts have written terms and conditions and a contract that clearly states what kind of contract they are on, and compensation where work is cancelled at no notice. They were the things that we had identified. Again, we want to think about a wider strategy for the bottom end of the labour market, not always focusing on a particular type of contract.

Chair

Understood. We just felt we needed to get our mind around that.

Helen Fairfoul

From higher education, we have been looking at zero hours’ contracts because there has been some challenge to suggest that there is a lot of it in higher education. We have found that where they are being used tends to be around student employment, where students want the flexibility. It reinforces that, if it is clear and everybody knows what it says on the tin, it can be a very desirable way in which to deal with genuinely casual, fluctuating demand from people who can work in that way. That is the university student cohort. The other area is professionals who want to make some input but need that flexibility. They can have their place; they can be good. I completely agree: it is complete clarity, transparency, the avoidance of abuse by adequate notice of the arrangements, and those sorts of things.

Chair

That is very helpful. Thank you very much for your thoughts on that. On behalf of the Committee, can I thank you for your time today and for some really excellent ideas on how we can try to shape the inquiry that we are leading here? Thank you very much. Oral evidence: Gender Pay Gap, HC 584 31