Uncorrected Evidence 400

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Trade and Industry Committee

(Sub-Committee on the Implementation of the Women and Work Commission)

on Wednesday 9 May 2007

Members present

Judy Mallaber, in the Chair

Roger Berry

Mrs Claire Curtis-Thomas

________________

Memoranda submitted by the Confederation of British Industry

and the Trades Union Congress.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Ms Susan Anderson, Director of Human Resources Policy, Ms Marion Seguret, Senior Policy Advisor, Confederation of British Industry, Ms Sarah Veal, Head of Equality and Employment Rights and Ms Rebecca Gill, Policy Officer, Trades Union Congress, gave evidence.

Q85 Chairman: Good morning and welcome; we are very pleased to see you here. I think this is the first time I have been at an evidence session where we have had the TUC and CBI in the same session. We thought as we were likely to ask you the same questions it might be more interesting, so long as the answers are kept reasonably brief, to have you dealing with the same questions and any interplay or comments you want to make on each other's responses as well. We look forward to this session and thank you very much for coming. Maybe you would like to introduce yourselves.

Ms Seguret: I am Marion Seguret; I am a Senior Policy Advisor at the CBI.

Ms Anderson: I am Susan Anderson; I am Director of Human Resources Policy at CBI.

Ms Veale: I am Sarah Veale, Head of Equality and Employment Rights at the TUC.

Ms Gill: I am Rebecca Gill and I head up Women's Equality Policy at the TUC.

Q86 Chairman: In the previous parliament we were very keen to look at women and work and particularly the gender pay gap and occupational segregation so it seemed logical for us to look at the follow up to the women and work report which obviously both your organisations were very involved with both in the work and in developing it. It is hardly surprising that both TUC and CBI have welcomed the report as you were both involved in presenting evidence and drawing it up. We know that the area of gender equality is very, very difficult because a lot depends on long term cultural change and it is not something that is going to be dealt with and changed overnight, but what are the main recommendations from the Commission's report that you think you and your members should concentrate on? Maybe the CBI could start us off on that.

Ms Anderson: I think the first thing I want to say really is that we have come a long way in the whole area of women being able to combine their work and caring responsibilities, but I think we recognise that we still have a way to go and I think the area we really want to focus on is the whole area of education and careers advice. Whilst we are seeing young girls really outperform boys in terms of achievement at GCSE and A level and even in degrees, they are not necessarily taking the A levels and degrees that lead to higher paid careers. We need better information and advice to girls in terms of their career options. We think work experience can play a useful role there. I think it is very much in the area of education, careers advice and work experience where more needs to be done. When it comes to work, particularly the whole work-life balance issue - rights to request flexible working - there things are generally working very well. We would want to focus on education and careers advice.

Ms Veale: We actually agree with that, so that is a good start. Obviously education and careers guidance pushes people into particular directions and gets them ready for particular vocations. I think the only danger with focussing too much on that is that it rather lets employers off the hook and there are several workplace issues that the TUC has identified as being absolutely key for reform, all of which are quite difficult because they involve quite serious changes and challenges to employers. I think the first is the whole issue of gender job segregation which of course is tied to careers advice and education pathways and so on. However, the fact is that you still have I think about 97 per cent of people working in childcare, for example, being women and other professions seem to be largely male ghettos at the moment. That has repercussions in terms of pay and status and there is a kind of vicious circle that operates where women apply for the sorts of jobs that they think other women do. I have two daughters who, obviously without any help from me, have identified particular areas of work that they simply would not be attracted to for a whole range of social and cultural reasons and lack of confidence. There is that and there are also issues about working hours and I think that now more women are in the labour market employers are having to pay much more attention to flexibility. There is a 24/7 culture now where a lot of businesses have to operate outside the old nine to five hours - certainly in the public sector that has been the case for a lot longer - so there is an attractive proposition to employers that they can match people's family needs and their needs to work flexibly with the needs of the job and the needs to provide services to the public. I think employers perhaps have not gone far enough with that and this is an area where trade unions can be of great assistance in making sure that flexible work is applied throughout. That actually benefits not just women but men because one of the other issues we have is that men are usually the bread winners and the people who are expected to earn the larger part of the family income and feel that they cannot afford to spend time looking after children. I think a lot of men would quite like to do that now but in order to achieve that employers have to be a lot more imaginative about the hours in which people work and the way in which shift patterns are organised. The Commission picked up flexible working and quality part time working as a major issue. It is hugely important. It should not be the case that part time work is seen as sub-standard work and something that would stop you from following a career because you are not really sufficiently enthusiastic about what you are doing. That is another big challenge for employers. Those are probably three issues we picked out as being of key importance. I do not know if Rebecca has anything to add.

Ms Gill: I think that quality part time work was absolutely crucial and the occupational segregation. The focus on careers advice, whilst it is useful, it very much focuses on young women and does not really support the women who are looking to come back into the labour market now or in the next five to ten years, who might be looking to change occupation as well and to support women who might have been doing a low paid job who decide that they wish to move into a more highly skilled job and need support in gaining those qualifications.

Q87 Chairman: You are putting responsibility on the employers to take some initiatives. I was interested in the CBI evidence which says: "The Commission's final report was well received with employers. They had committed to tackling the remaining courses of the gender pay gap". I am not altogether sure that employers in my constituency are conscious of the issue or want to deal with it and I wondered how you respond to explaining about your members being committed to it and what the position, for example, might be with smaller firms, whether there would be the same interest.

Ms Anderson: When looking at the causes of the gender pay gap we have to acknowledge - as Sarah has done - that a large part of it is caused by occupational segregation. The reason that I put so much emphasis on what is happening in education and careers is because I am afraid it starts in our schools. For example, if we look at the statistics in terms of A levels we see that only 22 per cent of those taking physics A levels are girls; only 39 per cent of those taking maths are girls; it is about equal in chemistry so we have made some strides there; more girls are doing biology than boys, around 57 per cent of biology A level students are girls. That knocks on into undergraduate degrees. If we look at the occupations that are open to those with science, technical engineering and maths degrees they tend to be better paid occupations. If we look, for example, at the starting salary for somebody in retail management - which is where perhaps the girl with the arts degree might look - it was �17,000 last year. The starting salary for someone who is going into investment banking, on the other hand, is �38,000 a year. Clearly if you have taken a maths degree or an engineering degree you are much more able to apply for higher paid jobs. If employers are not getting the applicants with the right levels of numeracy then they are not going to be able to appoint women so we need to go back into the education system and encourage more girls to do those A levels and those degrees that are going to lead to the higher paid occupations, or lead them to access the higher paid occupations. If we look at what is happening in the graduate market, for example, in those higher skilled jobs we see very little pay gap between men and women for those young people who have just graduated. Despite what I have said about the occupational segregation, the pay gap between male and females in the 22 to 29 age group is only two per cent. What happens at 30 is that women start to think about starting a family and obviously that will lead a high proportion of them perhaps to go into part time work where their career will tend to plateau for a period and that obviously can lead to men then taking a lead in terms of the pay and salaries. It is not a matter, I am afraid, of firms saying, "Oh, we don't believe in equality and I'm going to pay this woman less than this man". Those members that we know who have done equal pay audits have not found that they are paying men more than women doing the same job, it is because men have reached more senior positions and therefore have accessed the higher pay. Whilst at a company level you will see a gender pay gap it is because men have tended to reach higher levels and therefore higher pay.

Q88 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: You referred earlier on to focusing on education and careers guidance. Does that mean you have members that sit on the Connexions Board?

Ms Anderson: To be honest, I do not know whether we have members on the Connexions Board but there are employers on the Connexions Board. We have just put out a report on work experience. For example here is one we prepared earlier which Marion can probably tell you more details about.

Q89 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I wanted to know whether or not anybody was sitting as a representative on the Connexions Board and with respect to the employers what representations have you got on particular education boards or within any of the institutions that are responsible for delivering educational programmes into either further education or higher education?

Ms Anderson: If you would like me to provide you with a list I am very happy to do that.

Q90 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I do because when you say you are going to focus on something you need to articulate that to a set of institutions and organisations that have a remit in this particular area. Do you know where that is happening, otherwise it just sounds like words to me?

Ms Anderson: It is not words because we know our members are providing very valuable work experience for young people.

Q91 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I was not talking about work experience. You said you wanted to focus on education and careers. To do that you need to have an institutional position as well as offering practical experience. Where is that?

Ms Anderson: If I may say though that the days where CBI or TUC had an automatic right to sit on these committees, that is not something we ask for. CBI is represented through the employers. They will not necessarily wear a CBI hat but employers are there, so employers are on Ofsted Board, employers are on the Connexions Board, our members are delivering high quality services through actually providing Connexions services. Companies sit on the Job Centre Board. There are employers on all these boards and I am very happy to provide you with a list later on.

Ms Veale: There are trade unionists as well. Of course the career teachers are mostly in the NASUWT who gave us a lot of very useful information to inform our response to the initial Women and Work Commission activities. One point they make to us very strongly is that there has not been very much in the way of dedicated funding for careers teachers and what tends to happen is that somebody who is teaching full time as a day job gets careers teacher tacked on and that means they tend to do it in their spare time effectively. I pay tribute to a lot of very dedicated careers teachers or teachers who do careers advice as well. I think it is an area that has been vastly neglected. It is difficult because all you are doing as a careers teacher in a sense is putting an individual into a system so I come back to the problems in the work place because there is only a limited amount you can do as a careers advisor for older women and indeed for school leavers and graduates if the opportunities are not there. You have to remember that when you are directing people in particular directions.

Q92 Chairman: I think we will return to that. Our concern with this inquiry is not to repeat the facts and the analysis which is well known and understood and has been analysed within the report, it is to make sure that we get things to happen as a result. Before I hand over to Roger Berry specifically on the government's action plan, given that this is a very difficult area and we are talking long term change, are there any easy wins that either of you can see where we could make immediate progress on some part of the Women and Work Commission's report without it being ten or twenty years into the future?

Ms Veale: I think one area is the flexibility point and the right to request to work flexibly has been a great success I think probably to an extent to our surprise. The trouble is that it has picked out certain groups, it is now carers and parents of children aged up to six, but that leaves out parents of older children unless they are disabled. It gives employers quite a difficult task, which is how to manage a group of people who now have the right to ask to work flexibly and a group who do not have that right. I think one thing you could do is have a look at the legislation and see whether it could be extended so that all workers who have good reason can ask their employer if they can work flexibly. That would probably encourage more men to do that and take away the stigma that attaches to making those sorts of requests still and to career progression. There is still an attitude in a lot of work places that there is a period in women's lives when they are not proper contributors because they are likely to - or do - go off and have children and have difficulty working particular times and in particular jobs. I think one key thing that could be done is a lot of stimulation to employers and unions to work together to make flexible working a reality. I think that would unlock some of the problems. Gender job segregation is massively difficult to change because we operate in a free market system and people choose the jobs they want to go to. One interesting statistic that got missed out was that there is research that boys and girls - young men and young women - with exactly the same degree go out to work and within five years a gender pay gap appears between the man and the woman of 15 per cent. So there obviously is a problem which goes beyond education and careers guidance; there is something happening at work which is pushing women down all the time and that is another thing that has to be properly investigated, whether it is prejudice or the impact of culture on employment relations it is hard to say, but it is happening and it is useful that the Women and Work Commission are pulling out all these statistics and where to go is of course, as you say, a key point.

Q93 Chairman: Are there any quick wins from the CBI point of view that you can see?

Ms Anderson: I think why the Women and Work Commission report was impressive was that it did not actually go particularly for quick wins or, "Let's have some more legislation, that will sort it out" and I think it is admirable that it did not choose to do that. I know that for legislators it is always nice to pull the legislative lever but I would say that in this area further legislation would not help. I would agree with Sarah that the right to request has been a success, it has been extended to carers and actually CBI took the approach that it was best to do it in a staged way. We are not looking for rights to be extended, certainly in the lifetime of this parliament, to other groups and I think we have received some assurances on that front. That is not to say at some point in the future, yet to be determined, that that might not happen. I think there are no easy, quick, legislative wins on this one but, to be frank, it is a matter of building on what does work. There were 40 recommendations in the Women and Work Commission and I think in our evidence to you we went through each one of them to identify what is being done. I would say, from a CBI perspective, a pretty easy win would be to sort out the careers service. In the Leech report it is coming out pretty consistently across government the absence or lack of across-the-age careers service (to address Rebecca's point really) is leading to a waste of talent. We do need to address the issue of older women who may want to take a career change, who might want to take up an apprenticeship but present age bars prohibit them. I do put a lot of emphasis on careers but that is not legislation, that is ensuring that we get better quality careers service that is not stereotypical, that is impartial and gives young people and indeed older people access to impartial advice of a high quality.

Q94 Roger Berry: It has been said that the Government's Action Plan does not have the usual characteristics of an action plan in the sense that yes, the word "accepted" pops up in response to most of the report's recommendations, but in terms of specific courses of action, timescales et cetera, it is difficult - if not impossible - to find either in response to any of the recommendations in the Government's Action Plan. Equality action plans are meant to look a bit different, some would say, from the Government's response to the Commission. Do you think that is a fair criticism or are those critics being unreasonable?

Ms Anderson: In my view they are being somewhat unreasonable because, as I have said, I do not think that we need to say that this somehow is going to be the answer. I think that some of the things that the Government has been doing (I know some other organisations take a different view) for example the half a million pound fund for developing quality part time work is very much on the CBI agenda and the TUC agenda. I think it is actually helping develop some good practice and I think in many of the areas what we need to do is to grow the things that are already working rather than saying that legislation is somehow going to answer these things. It is good practice. It is using the funds that government is not making available and building on the best practice - the exemplar companies for example that the Commission helped to establish - and I think that is going to be far more productive than new initiatives that add little value or that focus on somehow requiring employers to have, for example, equal pay audits.

Ms Veale: From the TUC's perspective, we were disappointed there were no hard targets because you can measure things against a target. Something which can be demonstrated by figures would have been an appropriate area for setting a target. As the entire purpose of the exercise was to address the gender pay gap we were a little disappointed that there were not some specific ideas with targets attached to them. There is a big issue about funding as well because the Women and Work Commission recommended, for example, five million pounds for the Part Time Work Initiative and with that amount of money I think we could have gone with the CBI and worked out some really, really good proposals for targeting specific employers and specific areas where there are particular gender job segregation problems. As it is we got �500,000 distributed rather late in the day which has gone, frankly, to employers who are already doing a pretty good job. I think in a sense that has not been properly seen through. It is very well intended and it is going in exactly the right direction, but without being too critical more money would obviously have been very helpful and a bit more careful addressing of how you get employers, unions and others to work together to find out where the problems are and do specific projects which are time limited and have a specific objective in mind. The other thing I would just say that we though was extremely welcome was the focus of the Government on the skills level for BME (black, minority ethnic) women in particular where there are double problems of gender job segregation and ethnic job segregation as well. We very much welcomed the money that is going in to helping the Sector Skills Councils to identify areas where that is a specific problem and address the training deficit and the workforce development needs there. I think that will make quite a difference. There are a lot of positives but I think you are right, it is disappointing that there were not hard targets and more funding given to this important project.

Q95 Roger Berry: Apart from additional funding are there any other things that you would have liked to have seen in the Action Plan that are not there?

Ms Anderson: We are awaiting the DfES paper that we are expecting shortly and we do expect there to be some concrete proposals there and we will measure that very carefully to ensure that they are both taking the Leech Commission's recommendations very seriously and that they are addressing the very specific proposals that CBI has made in terms of improving careers advice. I am happy to share those with you. That is one area, for example, where we think there needs to be quite a comprehensive readjustment in terms of the resources and it could in fact require considerably more resources. That is one area where we shall be watching very closely to ensure that this new Green Paper will actually address our concerns about the inadequacies of the present service.

Ms Veale: I gather we are coming onto equal pay later on, but one of the biggest issues now is that we are almost in melt down in the public sector with an equal pay crisis of massive proportions. In a sense it is quite easy to be wise after events have suddenly appeared, but nonetheless I think the Woman and Work Commission did not really get to grips with the fundamental problems that the legislation is well out-of-date and does not actually apply any more to a modern workplace. I think that was a disappointment; they did not really get to grips with that issue. I know there is the Discrimination Law Review going on but I think the changes we need go well beyond legislative change - although that is desirable - and until you start at looking at a way of getting equal pay by looking systemically at issues in the workplace rather than encouraging individual women to put in applications that take 13 years to get through an employment tribunal, you are missing a trick on equal pay. One of the weaknesses for us in this was not only that they did not make recommendations about pay audits which we do think are important because you cannot expose gender pay discrimination, you cannot do anything about it because you do not know it is there, but also there are all the important areas of remedy and measures and so on and I think that was unfortunately a bit of a missed trick and it was partly to do with the timing. You could see it all coming; it has all been rumbling for a while.

Q96 Chairman: Coming back to this question of culture and how difficult it is to change it, the EOC pointed out that a lot of young people are interested in non-traditional areas of work and employers realise they need to get more women and skilled workers to deal with skills shortages and bring business benefits. However, the EOC were pointing out that we are still not really making much progress in opening up opportunity and choice. I know the CBI has focused very much on careers and skills and I understand that, but are there other ways in which both employees and employers can take action to break down that gender stereotyping? Is there a role there for employers and employees and if both employees and employers want to break some of those down what is stopping people? Is it just the careers advice at an earlier level and what happens in schools or is there something that is happening later on that you, as organisations, can address?

Ms Veale: For us one of the important keys to this is having people in the workplace who know about these issues and can have discussions with the employer about them. Unions come into their own there because they are interpreters of the employers' desire to run the business profitably, deliver the service and so on and the workforce desire to do things differently and genuinely often to give better opportunities for people who have not had those in the past. It is a question of completely rearranging work structures and systems. You have to take positive action. I know there are restrictions at the moment in terms legally of what employers can do, but adventurous employers would probably quite like to be able to give women the opportunity to be assisted into new areas of work and given the special training that might need and given the support that might take and put into positions where they are doing something very different and given the chance to try and test them with the guarantee that if it did not all work out there would be no prejudice and it would not count against them. I think also one of the other things you have to do is have women in senior positions because at the moment if you are working on the shop floor and you see the whole of the management system is white male you kind of switch off and say, "That's not for me, I can't do it because nobody else has done it". I think there is a real difficulty with that. You do have to take some artificial measures to push some women up, to push some disadvantaged groups up. I think that can only be done successfully if you have representatives of the workforce working with employers with a will to make it happen. I think there are a lot of good employers around who do want to make it happen but we see the role of the union equality rep as being absolutely key in that. They are trained up and work with the groups of people who want to try those new opportunities and they would be able to talk to the employer about who could do what where, what it would cost, what the implications would be and all the rest of it. Often the shop floor understands how the workforce operates better than some senior management who have become rather distanced from it. There is great opportunity there but there has to be quite a lot of good will on both sides. We do talk to the CBI and there is quite a lot of interesting work we are thinking of developing together. That is something the Woman and Work Commission ought to be pushing, they ought to be pushing us together and telling us that together we can make some changes. We have to.

Ms Anderson: Here is one we prepared earlier, a CBI/TUC and, indeed, DTI practical ways to reduce long hours and reform working practices. This is something that we did and we looked at case studies of companies that had addressed the whole issue of work-life balance but I think it is important to recognise not just for the benefit of women but also for men, where you started off by saying that caring responsibilities are not just a matter for women, they are also a matter of giving men the opportunity to have better work-life balance. In this report we looked at the very positive examples of what companies are doing in terms of addressing work-life and long working hours. We had a range of companies, for example BNFL, who introduced a annualised hour system and credit time and they reduced overtime, for example, to the delight of the company but also with the acceptance of the workforce who actually found that their overall pay was actually slightly higher than it had been in an environment where they had relied on overtime. Another company in a completely different sector, Eversheds, introduced a work-life policy with about seven or eight different options from annualised hours to zero hours. This is attractive both to men and women although we have to recognise that the vast majority of that particular company who took advantage of it were women. There are many good examples of companies who are doing things and we are finding through our surveys that the companies are taking the whole work-life balance agenda very seriously. As Sarah said, this is not just a matter that benefits employees, it benefits employers because if you want to have flexible working either because you are in retailing or because you are in financial services and you have 24/7 - you are dealing with Singapore and India - you need people who are prepared to come in and you want them to come in and work happily and contentedly so you offer them working life options that suit them. Our surveys show that the vast majority of employers are offering at least one flexible working opportunity, it is often part time work because that particularly suits women with childcare responsibilities, but we are tracking this over time and, for example, the numbers that are offering at least three has been steadily rising. Companies are doing an awful lot.

Q97 Chairman: Are there mechanisms for getting the positive value that employers get from such arrangements over to other companies and employers that may be rather behind the game on it?

Ms Anderson: I do not quite recognise some of these companies that you are talking about. You particularly asked me about smaller firms. We found, for example, in our survey of members that actually smaller firms provide and agree to more requests for flexible working than their larger colleagues. They do offer more informally; they do not necessarily go through the formal right to request and follow it to the letter, but actually I think they accepted something like 96 per cent of all requests whereas the average was 90.

Q98 Chairman: What about the other areas like the gender stereotypes not just flexible working, companies, employers actively going out to recruit women into slightly less usual areas of work?

Ms Anderson: Sometimes these choices reflect a real decision about the sort of lifestyle that you want to have and I think we should not say that what we are aiming for is equal outcomes necessarily if actually the fact that women prefer to go into teaching, for example when we look at some aspects we see that primary schools are dominated by women. If that reflects a genuine wish of women to go into teaching I do not think we need to say that we should be aiming at a 50/50 split; I think we have to give people choices and opportunities. We are not going to drag people kicking and screaming into sectors of the workplace where they do not want to go. Yes, we do things like this with TUC; these are available on our websites. We have another guidance that we did which we published recently and this is a report that was actually financed under the European Commission funding. This again is emphasising the real practical benefits to employers of work life balance and also gives them a guide. In terms of what can be done - Sarah makes this point very well - around positive action, again we find here that there is a difference between large and small but what we find is that large firms tend to be more comfortable than smaller firms with positive action because a lot of people know that positive discrimination is not permitted but positive action is. Large firms will have teams of in-house lawyers or HR experts and they know the difference; smaller firms do not and so they may worry that they are not allowed to do that because that is not permissible, that is positive discrimination. Therefore they need better guidance on the difference between permissible positive action and what would take them into unlawful positive discrimination. I think they can learn from each other and that is an area where we would expect and hope CEHR to make a matter of priority.

Q99 Roger Berry: In the CBI evidence you talk about the importance of high quality work experience placements for young people and you give examples of good practice in relation to business education partnerships and so forth. What do you think needs to be done to move that project forward, to really push hard in that direction?

Ms Anderson: I think this is a matter for schools and for employers and for young people. Marion can take us forward on that one.

Ms Seguret: I think with 95 per cent of students in the run up to GCSEs when they are taking work experience placements there is a huge opportunity to open up their minds to non-traditional sectors, particularly in science and engineering. As Susan mentioned earlier, since we have submitted our evidence we have published this report with the DfES on work experience and how work experience can help develop both employability skills and also raise students' awareness about potential careers and sectors. We have found that the great majority of students - over 90 per cent - enjoy their placement. The employers we spoke to also said that they saw the promotion of relevant careers in sectors as one of the key benefits of work experience. It is a great story. There is still a long way to go with only 60 per cent of students finding that work experience has really helped them identify a future career but we are heading in the right direction. We mentioned earlier that it is really about a partnership between schools and employers. This report, for example, has defined an employability framework, the types of skills that can be developed during work experience and can form a good basis for other employers to use.

Q100 Roger Berry: As you say, relationships between schools and employers are important but do you see a role for trade unions in this?

Ms Anderson: If I may give an example, one of our member firms in the engineering sector who was involved in this report worked with the trade union. When the children went in to do their work experience they were assigned a mentor on the shop floor. The individual who was doing the mentoring - the shop floor employee - takes an immense amount from that and it was with the full support of the trade union. This company said that the benefit to the employee was almost better than the benefit to the individual, the young person coming in, because they got such a positive experience from mentoring somebody and passing on their life experience and work experience and really feeling that they had sold a career in engineering to this young student. That was something that was developed in association with the trade union and is one of our company cases that is in this report but it was very much developed in partnership with the trade union.

Ms Veale: We do train trade unionists when they have the time - there is an issue about getting time off work for this to go into schools - and they are particularly good about talking about things from the bottom up. We have designed various activities they can do with young people in the school which illustrate particular issues that arise at work and try to give them a flavour of what working life is really like. We also work very closely with the National Union of Students because huge numbers of students now work part time and that can be quite an important opportunity for tasting different types of job in different sectors as well. We do our best to help out with that and to expose young people to the trade union view of the world of work, but we are limited in terms of resources.

Q101 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Does the CBI carry a list of companies that offer work based experience for young people and is that made available to schools?

Ms Anderson: We have companies who have exemplar experience. Unfortunately CBI members do not cover the entire workforce.

Q102 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: That was not the question I asked.

Ms Anderson: We do not keep a list because that is not our role but if you look at all the education business partnerships they keep the lists. It is not our role to act as a broker, but there are broker organisations who keep lists.

Q103 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: So you do not know how many of your employers actually provide work based experience.

Ms Anderson: That was not the question you asked me. To answer that question our survey shows that over 70 per cent are providing work experience to students.

Q104 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: The problem I have is that when I go to engineering companies very few of them are linked into local schools and when you go to local schools of course the opportunities to place young people in very diverse opportunities in the work place simply does not exist because they are not aware of the companies and I think they would be very interested to know which companies offered work based experience.

Ms Anderson: If you would like to let me know your constituency I am sure I can put you in touch with firms who would be very happy to provide people with work experience.

Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Thank you.

Q105 Chairman: I heard recently of a very good experience of a young girl on a young apprenticeship scheme going into an engineering company which was very positive and exactly what you said, a good experience for the people working there as well.

Ms Anderson: There are safety issues and I must say you cannot always allow young people into environments where they might be unsafe. In the experience I gave you - that was Landrover - they had to pay very acute attention to the health and safety implications of having a 16 year old on the shop floor. It has to be managed very well and you do need resources there so sometimes it can be the larger firms, particularly in those sectors, where there could be hazards and sometimes it is easier to offer it in areas that are not so hazardous.

Q106 Roger Berry: The CBI make a number of very detailed recommendations on careers guidance which are very helpful. That was written 11 months ago and I suppose 11 months is not a long time in history, but in recent times have you seen local authorities, government and other players actually taking up some of these recommendations? Obviously the trade unions have made similar comments, the Commission has made similar comments, do you see any evidence of a significant impetus in that area to make improvements?

Ms Anderson: That is the area where we would like to see much faster progress. It is recommendations that we have made in our evidence to the Government, CSR - we published this only last week - and we repeat our recommendations in this area and we will continue to repeat our recommendations in this area until somebody takes some action. We have costed it; we have put it in our CSR which we also published on Monday so we will continue to really ram this one home.

Ms Gill: As a result of the funding that the Chancellor announced from the Woman and Work Commission the Sector Skills Councils which are employers and trade unions have worked very hard and they have had two rounds of funding for projects which would push people - women in particular - into non-traditional occupations. That has happened in the last 11 months that these companies and unions had to demonstrate that they were working together, that they had fully costed and understood how their projects were going to address the barriers that older women might face going into a new occupation and the application form they filled in had to clearly demonstrate that they understood all these barriers and issues. They only got funding if they could demonstrate this and they could run with this project over the next 12 to 18 months. There is some evidence and in particular the money that came for that training has been really, really important and will be well spent. I know the Olympics are being used as well to train women - the unions and the employers working together - to get women into non-traditional occupations as well. I think that is a really important example of what has happened quite quickly in a time when things might be moving quite slowly elsewhere.

Q107 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: You mention some interesting examples of how slightly changing the way jobs are described - for example BT's experience with apprenticeships - can encourage a greater number of women to apply for them. How can we encourage the spread of good practice?

Ms Anderson: I think we all have a responsibility there in our separate ways. Certainly those government bodies that are charged with spreading good practice, whether it is the EOC presently or the CHR in the future, we very much hope they will play their role just as we and the TUC are playing our roles in spreading good practice. There is another initiative that we are both involved in, for example, called Workwise UK and that is very much focused on telework which is good for the environment and helps those people who want to be able to work from home either because they have caring responsibilities or just want to cut down on all their travelling time. There are a lot of initiatives that are helping. We also drew attention to women in science and engineering so there are a lot of things that are going together.

Q108 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Do you have any apprenticeship programmes within the CBI and what areas do they cover?

Ms Anderson: We do not have apprenticeship programmes.

Q109 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: You do not offer any apprenticeships in your own organisation.

Ms Anderson: It would be hard to think of where that would be relevant to the CBI. Apprenticeship programmes tend to be vocational and I am afraid there is not an apprenticeship for lobbying and campaigning apprentices at this moment in time.

Q110 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: There are a range of apprenticeships for young people who are considering administration or work in IT or statistical evidence and all of those would be applicable in the area of CBI.

Ms Anderson: I am afraid our IT is outsourced to an external firm. I could find out whether they provide apprenticeships.

Q111 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I presume you have administration within your own organisation.

Ms Anderson: We have very little administration within our organisation.

Q112 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I am not comfortable with any organisation the size of yours not having apprenticeship schemes.

Ms Anderson: How big do you imagine our organisation is?

Q113 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I know exactly how large it is, but if you think of yourselves as a small to medium size enterprise many of those are thinking about ways to involve young people in apprenticeships and I do not see any reason why the CBI does not do the same, which of course goes to my question about how do you spread good practice? They might be reading about it but the question is how do you take companies that hitherto have been very reluctant to employ young people to actually give young people and women the opportunity to take up work place experiences?

Ms Anderson: I am very happy to give you lots of data about the diversity split of the CBI. Perhaps I could share that with you later. We provide work experience, we provide internships; we do not provide apprenticeships but we have a very good record and I am very happy to share with you many of our diversity factors within the CBI if you would like have that after this meeting.

Q114 Chairman: I think we should ask the TUC to comment on that.

Ms Veale: I think the word apprentices might be slightly difficult because it has all sorts of connotations of young men on print machines and what have you.

Q115 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: You and I will know that it is a very diverse offering today. It is not just about construction based opportunities; it covers a whole plethora of work wherever it may arise.

Ms Veale: In a sense similarly to the CBI we offer internships and we do that kind of thing like work experience programmes. We have tried systems of bringing people up from relatively junior jobs to more senior jobs which has been difficult. I am not pretending that is easy, it is quite difficult because of expectations amongst the existing workforce. It is quite difficult to invent that and sell it to people who are already thinking they have jobs earmarked for themselves. One of the things that we have done is to change our recruitment practices so that when job applications come in people put all their details about their gender, their age and so on on a separate sheet which are all detached from the forms and the people doing the selection for interview simply get "Person One", "Person Two", "Person Three" so they are completely unable to tell the gender or disability or whatever of anyone who comes in. That is having some quite surprising positive results because every organisation is, to an extent, going to be guilty of forms of discrimination that they are not aware of, not intentionally but just because of old practices and so on.

Ms Gill: We do also run a mentoring scheme at the TUC as well so staff are encouraged to take on a young person to come in and it tends to be slightly longer than a work experience scheme and we did certainly have an apprentice at the TUC about three or four years ago who went onto much bigger and better things having worked at the TUC.

Q116 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Yesterday I had a very interesting lunch with the head of human resources at British Gas who said that they were very worried about gender issues and the lack of women in customer services within British Gas. They had got around this problem very creatively by recruiting on the basis of attitude rather than skill. They said that attitude is a much better new tool for recruitment rather than looking at somebody's skills at the time of recruitment because skill is something you learn but they thought that attitude was possible something a bit more difficult to provide. I thought it was a very good model. Have you heard of any other companies who are looking at recruiting on the basis of attitude because to me they have had a something like 300 per cent increase in the number of women applying. That is still very small, but nevertheless it is a significant jump as a result of that particular position. Have you heard of anything like this before?

Ms Veale: It sounds absolutely admirable. I think that is potentially a very exciting area to explore and I would have thought that that is the sort of thing that ought to be disseminated amongst companies especially if you can get an employer who has done something like that and it has been a success and has not affected their profit margins and they are recruiting better because of it. I suppose in a way businesses tend to be competitive rather than ideologically geared to sharing things that have made them as successful as they are. Nonetheless I think an important role for the CEHR is going to be marshalling examples and doing a lot of work to push them at other employers and even possibly use their powers to formally investigate in sectors and in companies where there is a clear problem and you could do the two things together. You could say, "It's no good telling us that it is impossible, here's a company of a similar size which has done this". They would have a big role in that I would think.

Ms Anderson: I think attitude is absolutely essential. All employers these days are telling us that actually it is attitude they look for above all else, particularly when they are recruiting young school leavers. If you have the right sort of attitude, you are positive about work and you want to learn, then that is the sort of employee, no matter what age, that you are looking for. In our employability template it is all bound up in attitude. Of course it is about the basic skills of numeracy and literacy but if you do not have people with the right attitude then no matter how you train them they are not going to succeed. Attitude across the piece is important but, as you say, there are companies who are really taking these positive action steps and, as I said before, they do tend to be the larger firms because they are looking to address occupational segregation. One of our members called N G Bailey have some particular interesting experiences to offer. Marion, do you want to expand on that?

Ms Seguret: N G Bailey was a case study in the report and amongst the issues to address for work experience and I think it applies also for apprenticeships is that many students are usually not aware what the apprenticeship or even the career will generally involve and informing them and giving them clear advice before joining the programme is important. N G Bailey, for example, involves parents in the apprenticeship programmes to make sure that the student has a good support from his or her family and the company and better advice and guidance would also help address gender stereotyping when choosing an apprenticeship or a career generally.

Q117 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: The CBI's memorandum mentions initiatives by three Sector Skills Councils to increase the recruitment of women in their industries. Which of the Sector Skills Councils actually did this? I would be interested to know that. These are the Councils that our predecessors identified as taking a lead in best practice, are there any others that you know of - and could you let me know their names - which are following their good practice?

Ms Anderson: As we pointed out it is e-skills, construction skills and SEMTA. It may come as no surprise to you that these are three of the best Sector Skills Councils and as I am sure you are aware the experience of Sector Skills Councils is somewhat patchy. There are some very good ones, these three are particularly good. There are others like Cogent, for example, which deals with the chemical sector which is also good. I think we have to recognise - the DfES does this - that Sector Skills Councils are a bit of a mixed bag and indeed the Leech report recommended that we do need to review Sector Skills Councils to ensure they are all of an equally high standard. What we have seen is the better Sector Skills Councils getting a grip with this issue and saying that there are actions they can take, they are promoting best practice doing exactly what you have been suggesting they ought to be doing. These ones are doing well; others are not so well advanced. If we look at a variety of sectors - again they are in all the case study examples I have given - we are seeing individual firms take a lead whether it is in IT, whether it is in consultancy or other sectors, individual firms really doing quite a lot of good things. I am afraid that because they do not have such a good Sector Skills Council maybe that is not being promoted in the way that it could be.

Q118 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I actually work with 12 of the Sector Skills Councils. The three that you have mentioned are dominated by very large companies; 80 per cent of their membership comes from three or four firms. You have classified them as good and I would argue that quite a number of the other Sector Skills Councils are also very good. SummitSkills, for instance, handles a huge number of employers. They do not have the benefit of BT or British Gas; they have to deal with a plethora of small to medium sized enterprises throughout this country and I think they are doing an equally good job. What I do know is this, that for each of the Sector Skills Councils that you have mentioned, the good ones that you have described, support from organisations such as the CBI is not difficult; for smaller Sector Skills Councils trying to get responses from either CBI or the TUC has been incredibly difficult. In fact, there are no members from the CBI or the TUC sitting on some of the Sector Skills Councils boards. Can you just tell me why this is?

Ms Anderson: Because the CBI leaves it to those people who are expert in those sectors to sit on those boards.

Q119 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Forgive me, but what you were telling me earlier on was that careers advice was absolutely fundamental to you.

Ms Anderson: Generic, yes.

Q120 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Yet the main platforms that are responsible for providing a link between the employers and education provision in this country are the Sector Skills Councils and I look to them and I challenge them on a regular basis about what they are doing to offer experience to women and young people. They tell me that without direct support from either CBI or business based organisations they are running into a brick wall of difficulty. They need the support. Can I hear from you again about how you articulate something that you say is a very important objective of the CBI in such a way that it works with those organisations that are charged with the job of delivering what your members want.

Ms Anderson: My colleague has reminded me that Simon Bartley is actually the Chair of SummitSkills and he is a CBI member and he sits on our Education and Training Committee, so we are involved.

Q121 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: He is not sitting there as a CBI member though, is he?

Ms Anderson: No, he would not be. It is not the role of the CBI - we do not have the staff - to sit on every Sector Skills Council. You say there are 12 good ones; there are 24 in all and even the DfES recognise that not all are very good and that is why Leech has suggested that they do need to be relicensed. He has also suggested that they focus on their key task which is actually not about providing careers advice to young people in their sectors, it is about ensuring that the skills needs and gaps are identified and appropriate action taken to fill them. Leech has suggested that they ought to focus particularly on the reform of qualifications which is something we entirely support.

Q122 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Could I ask you, Mrs Veale, about the role of the TUC in respect of the Sector Skills Councils?

Ms Veale: Obviously in principle we would like to have a trade unionist on every single one.

Q123 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: But there is not.

Ms Veale: No there is not and I accept that and it something we are looking into. It is often a question of time. Trade unionists are often lay members who have very busy working commitments and if any of the activities take place during working hours they have to get permission and pay to get off and do other things. That excuses some of them. The trade union movement is not growing at the moment. Full time officers now have a wider and wider range of responsibilities that they have to undertake and it is invidious to try to rank things in terms of importance but it is for each affiliated union to decide within its limited resources what it is going to put its people onto. I take what you say and we will try to find out the exact areas where there is no representation from trade unions and see what we can do to try to stimulate more interest in that. I do very much take your point, we should not just preach goodness and light and then not actually make sure we have bodies in place to deliver the message and do the work.

Q124 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I think they are there, they are charged with the job and I think that matters very much to both the CBI and the TUC but without direct support it makes their positions extremely difficult. They also need the backing of those organisations in order to deliver their objectives.

Ms Veale: We do give them backing, we train them. We have a whole section at the TUC which trains people and gets them ready for it and we do try to stimulate particularly women in trade unions to go onto these things. It is a slow process and all I can do is agree with you; we need to do better and we are trying to do better and to get people into these positions. It is not easy; it is a big challenge but I agree it is important.

Q125 Chairman: Very briefly, because you have already touched on it, the TUC said the Quality Part Time Work Initiative was for you a really high priority and getting your high priority part time jobs is clearly a key factor (which is one reason why I am trying to keep my local tax office open) but you were also critical about the lack of funding. What does that mean your organisation is currently thinking about this Initiative? Does it mean that it is really not working properly at all? How would you like to see it develop into a wider programme and does that require more funding?

Ms Veale: The trouble is that it is very limited funding and I think because it was done quickly companies who were already doing well put their hands up and said they could use some money to keep going with something they are already doing. If there had been a bit of a step back and perhaps there had been more active engagement with both of our organisations and other employers' bodies as well. I think we could have worked out a much more sophisticated targeted approach to this where we pick out particular areas and sectors where there is a real issue with part time work and nobody above a senior level is doing part time work at all and develop pilot projects which would have to be funded because you are talking about taking people away from the workforce, devising programmes with them and then going back into the workforce to get them running. These things are not cost free and need much more attention to detail and some much more careful shaping up of actual projects you could do. You could then show by example that it is possible to do all sorts of jobs part time. It is not quite so much of a horrendous challenge as people think it is. It is a key area though.

Q126 Chairman: We have not lost the possibility of going back on that because clearly we are in a position where we can make recommendations.

Ms Gill: We will recognise it as something that will happen over the longer term. We would need funding and we would need funding in particular areas where there is no culture of part time work. I think that is one of the problems. We have a lot of evidence that shows that women work part time because they need to and they will go into jobs where there is a lot of part time work often close to where they live because of caring responsibilities and so on. So they need part time work that is local to them and a recognition that more senior grades may be in areas that have not traditionally been occupied by them or where they are already occupied. We see it as something that would happen over a long period of time. It would need pilot projects. We have talked a bit about best practice and I think it is about putting a business case to employers. It requires a whole cultural shift in our attitudes to part time work. Certainly from the TUC perspective when we have looked at it with affiliates there is a sense of what jobs could be done part time and almost everyone sits there saying, "I wonder what jobs could be done part time?". I think this needs to be explored in much greater detail. If you are talking about it in the next five years or something it would require quite a bit of investment.

Ms Veale: If you look at British Airways that is a very good example. They were actually taken to a tribunal over it which was unfortunate, but it was sheer timidity on the part of management: "We can't possibly have pilots working part time, there'll be crashes, it won't work" but actually when they sat down and thought about it it is a perfect industry for part time work but there is no adventurous approach to it. What you need to do with this initiative is to pick out those kinds of areas which culturally have become no-go areas for part time workers and say, "Why? Do it, here you are; get on with it, this is how you do it. Here's some money, you work with the union and devise some part time shift".

Q127 Chairman: From the nodding of the heads do I presume the CBI regards it as equally important as the TUC?

Ms Anderson: Yes, we could have usefully had a bigger fund and if we look at companies like Lloyds TSB for example where they have an on-line job share register maybe we could, with a bit more money, perhaps take that beyond individual companies or help other companies use the sectoral approach so we can put two women engineers in touch with each other so they can do job sharing. There are some imaginative ways in which we can build on what is there already. Asda has a part time manager scheme. People are developing these role models, as it were, but we can say that with a bit more money we can go out and make some approaches either on a sectoral basis because we know there is a particular problem or because we know there are a lot of women there who would like to work on a part time job sharing basis. With more money we could do a bit more.

Q128 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I am not very sure of my facts here but I understood that the progress in increasing the number of female directors of companies has stalled and there was some suggestion that it might have been reversed. You clearly know better than I so could you tell me what the situation is with women directors? Is the number increasing or has it stalled or is it in decline? If so, why? How do we overcome this sort of problem?

Ms Anderson: I am aware that the statistics on women directors has recently been published but I am afraid I do not have it to hand. I agree with you that that is what it was suggesting but of course it is a one year result and I think they are looking at FTSE 250 so a few movements can actually make quite a big difference. I think we need not just to look at FTSE 100 or FTSE 250 directors, we need to look at what is happening elsewhere. If you look, for example, at the number of female managers again we have seen a lot of progress and that is not stalling. If you look at the statistics there I think we have gone from eight per cent female managers to 30 per cent female managers. Obviously having female managers hopefully they will reach director level and the board. The other area where there are grounds for some optimism is among entrepreneurs. We are seeing more women. Maybe it is for a variety of reasons; maybe it is because they cannot get the work-life balance they want at work so they set up their own firms. I do not think we should look at the directors on boards which tend to focus on the very top echelons and where a few movements can actually alter the statistics quite considerably. If we look at managers and entrepreneurs we are seeing some much more positive signs of change there. I am happy to get the statistics for you.

Q129 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: How long do we have to have women in good managerial jobs for before they become eligible for boards?

Ms Anderson: Clearly you need to have the work experience that is going to fit you to be on a board. I agree it is not an area where we can be complacent but, as I say, the number of women who are setting up their own companies and therefore are chief executive, chairman of the board is growing. I think these companies have gone up from 18 to 30 per cent over five years. That is a pretty good rate of progress but clearly we need to build on that.

Ms Veale: I think one of the problems is the sort of clubbishness that still prevails at the very top of companies and the way you get onto the board is to appeal to the people who are currently on the board. The way that some exclusively male boards operate is "nudge, nudge, clubroom, that person is an okay chap". I think there is a blindness; they just do not think women are going to fit and that is loaded with all sorts of appalling cultural and sexist implications. There is a rather opaque approach to it. There is some kind of osmotic process by which people get onto these boards which is very mysterious and cloaked in secrecy. It is not open and I think that is one of the real problems with this and women just think there is no point. It is very unpleasant trying and being rejected and women do not want to go through with it. I can see why they are more tempted to go off and set up their own businesses; that is really getting round the problem rather than tackling it head on. I do not know what you do about it, whether through company law you take action to force boards to be more representative. You could do it, you could say that it is not acceptable, it is discrimination, there are no women on the board, no proportional number of BME that reflects the local population, no disabled people and it simply is not acceptable any more. This is presumably outside the remit of what you are looking at.

Q130 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Has there been any cultural shift with regard to promoting women to boards in the last ten years?

Ms Gill: It depends on the company. Some companies have bought the business case for why you want women for example if they are trying to target women as their customers or they want to recruit more women to their organisation then they will have seen that this is worthwhile.

Q131 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Is there a business case for doing it?

Ms Gill: There is a business case for it. I would say there is a moral case for it but there will be others out there in the wider world who do not see that moral case.

Ms Anderson: If you look at our report we are reporting on what is happening in respect of the Higgs and Tyson report. We talk about the setting up of women directors on boards which actually is many of the FTSE 100 companies themselves coming together to ensure that they are creating effective ways of encouraging people, as Sarah say, from under-represented groups themselves to move up. In our evidence we are giving quite a lot of good examples of where this is actually happening but I certainly agree that we need to make more progress.

Q132 Roger Berry: Moving onto the legislative framework, you disagree strongly on equal pay reviews. Is there any realistic alternative?

Ms Veale: I do not think there is because you are never going to identify a gender pay segregation problem or unequal pay where it is to do with sex discrimination until you have open and transparent processes whereby you can examine grading systems, pay structures, promotion opportunities and all the rest of it. We have had years and years and years of employers telling us that it will happen, they will do it, it is good practice and it is not happening enough. Congratulations to the ones that do do it. There is a gender public sector duty which gets near to requiring the public sector not quite to do pay audits but it is very process driven and it would be very hard for them to comply properly without doing some kind of auditing. If it is necessary in the public sector, why not in the private sector? It is going to hit the private sector through procurement initiatives so they are going to have to get used to it sooner or later. I think we will get there because I do not think you can do this without doing a proper analysis. I will come on later if you want me to to why that leads to difficulties with individual claims and all the rest of it, but there is no way that you can tackle sex discriminatory pay systems without exposing them. I think employers are going to have to come up with a position where they are required to do that in company reports or by whatever means. So yes, we differ on that.

Ms Anderson: It pains me to disagree with you, Sarah, but it had to happen. This is an area where the Government set targets and the target was that 45 per cent of larger firms should have completed an equal pay audit by 2008. I am pleased to say that we have already got there. According to our survey 58 per cent of larger firms have already conducted an equal pay audit (larger firms are those that employ more than 5000 staff) and a further 14 per cent were planning to do so. That 58 per cent from our last employment trend survey compares to 44 per cent in 2004, so we are seeing firms conducting these equal pay audits. Whether they should be compulsory is another matter. We think we are getting to those firms that need to do it through good practice. We do not think the small firms need to go to the considerable expense of having a full equal pay audit. I think the interesting thing that emerges when firms have done these pay audits is that whilst half of them found a pay gap the pay gap was largely as a result of the fact that men tended to be in more senior positions and therefore they tended to have higher pay. That explained the headline equal pay gap which you will see on a firm by firm basis; it was not that women were paid less for doing the same job as a man, it reflected the reality of the labour market which is that men tend to be in more senior positions and are paid more. Some of the other issues that the pay audits exposed - this is sometimes the reason a firm does a pay audit - was that they had merging pay scales after a take over or merger so where you might have a unionised environment a different union negotiated a pay agreement for certain grades of staff for a new firm or the merger of a new firm and those obviously take some time to integrate. Firms will often red circle groups of employees because you cannot just raise everybody's pay up to the highest level. That can cause some problems where you have red circled people after a take-over or merger. Indeed, you may have agreed to do that with your trade union and hence some of the problems in the public sector that Sarah as alluded to earlier. Where companies have identified action they have taken action appropriately. They may have, for example, reviewed performance management systems or introduced diversity training or new pay structures. However, I have to say that in half the cases they did not discover any pay gap and therefore action was not appropriate. I think you just have to realise that equal pay audits of the sort that the EOC suggest are very labour and resource intensive and they do not in the majority of cases reveal that there is an equal pay problem. To suggest that this is going to be some sort of panacea for closing the pay gap, I do not think it will do that because the days when employers thought they could get away with paying their women less than their men are long gone.

Q133 Roger Berry: What do you estimate is the cost of a small company doing an equal pay audit? I am a small company; like most members of Parliament I employ two or three people. I comply with all the equality legislation that is currently on the statute book as I am aware and I do not find it a burden whatsoever. What kind of burden in reality is doing an equal pay audit for a company employing ten people?

Ms Anderson: If I could direct you to the EOC's equal pay tool kit, it is pretty comprehensive. You could say, "I've looked at the pay levels and I can't see any problems". Do you have to go through all the complexity of a pay audit to say that? That is not what we are saying. We are not saying that every single company, even if they only have three people employed, have to do this particular pay audit. Obviously the smaller a company is, the quicker and easier it is because you are not doing massive job evaluations.

Ms Veale: The thing is, Susan, in a large company there is no substitute for doing a proper pay audit. It should be done as a matter of good practice. You say they are doing them and they are not identifying any serious sex discrimination problems, then good. Companies should do them and say, "We've done one, there are no serious sex discrimination problems, there are no sex discrimination problems" but you have this 42 per cent on your own statistics of employers over a particular size who are not doing them. It is not good enough. They are undercutting good employers and sex discrimination in pay systems is illegal in this country. It is serious; they are breaking the law and it is not acceptable.

Ms Anderson: We are not finding that it is at all as widespread as you are suggesting and therefore we do not think that equal pay audits are the solution; there are better ways of addressing the gender pay gap. You asked me about a medium sized firm, in our evidence we gave some of the examples of how much it did cost. For example, with a firm of 700 staff they had to pay �14,000 to an external consultant to come and do a pay audit. That is quite a lot of money if you only have 700 staff to discover you do not have a problem. Maybe you are going to say that that is money well spent but I have to say that when you are looking at your diversity issues then conducting a pay audit when you know you have done a simple analysis and there is no problem is it sensible to say you are going to spend �14,000 on a consultant to do the EOC - which is what will happen if we have legislation - recommended pay audit. You might be better off spending your time providing that resource to train managers, to think about some other positive action. There are better ways of spending your money than going through a tick box exercise of saying you have done an equal pay audit.

Q134 Roger Berry: So that would be about �20 per employee.

Ms Veale: I question your figures. With 700 we would do it for you for a quarter of that price.

Roger Berry: This is on public record; this is progress.

Chairman: We knew we would not get agreement on this issue and this is a good reason why we wanted you both here at the same time.

Q135 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: You both say that public procurement is a very good vehicle to promote equality and diversity and that is absolutely splendid. I guess you can give me a number of good examples where public procurement has done exactly that.

Ms Veale: I think it is working in London. If you look down the road at the GLA they are taking some very important initiatives on that and it is beginning to work. I do not have their information to hand.

Chairman: We are asking them to come and see us.

Q136 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: What about outside London, where we have major public procurement projects that are driving the diversity and equality agenda?

Ms Anderson: If I am honest it is patchy.

Q137 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Do you have any examples?

Ms Anderson: Yes, we do have examples. I am happy to send them to you; I do not actually have them to hand.

Q138 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I would like to see them.

Ms Anderson: I am very happy to send them to you. What our members tell us is that what they will find is that they will be asked to bid on the basis that they have effective diversity policies - it may be on gender, it may be on race, it may be on disability - and they will spend a lot of time putting in a bid to demonstrate just how they are prepared to take very positive action. Then to their disappointment they find that whoever is doing the procurement just goes for the cheapest bid. That is very disappointing and of course it does nothing for this whole issue of diversity or the commitment to diversity if, having put in your bid, you know it has just gone to the lowest bidder who has not actually made any attempt to address the diversity agenda. That is a common complaint from our members.

Q139 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Is that public procurement in the local government sector or for major government departments.

Ms Anderson: It is across the piece.

Q140 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I would like specific examples for each.

Ms Anderson: I am very happy to share them with you.

Q141 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I would very much like to see that. Is that your experience as well, Ms Veale.

Ms Veale: I think so. Another place you could look is the Olympic Development Agency which, although it is based in London, is a nationwide project. We have been talking to their diversity manager and there are some very exciting procurement activities there, particularly on the basis of gender, race and ethnicity. That is coming along and developing. We can similarly look for local authority examples through our regional structures and programmes.

Q142 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Do you think it is easy for employers to tackle the ethnic requirements that are placed upon them rather than the gender duties that are placed upon them?

Ms Veale: They are different. I would not have thought one was more difficult than the other. They take different approaches and in a sense gender is easier to measure, you are either a woman or you are not a woman. With the BME populations there are shades between and there are issues about, for example, migrant workers coming in from Eastern European countries who are white; they are ethnic minorities but they are not black. There are all sorts of cultural permutations that are quite difficult on the BME side. I am not saying one is easier than the other though, I think they are both challenging.

Q143 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Do you think the gender equality duty should be extended to the private sector?

Ms Veale: Yes.

Ms Anderson: I think the public sector duty has been round longer in terms of race than it has in terms of gender so there is a difference there. What we have failed to be convinced by within the public sector the duty to promote has actually delivered better outcomes and I think until we can see convincing evidence that within the public sector it is so much ahead of the private sector in terms of either the practice or the outcomes either on gender or diversity, I do not think that we would see that general duty to promote being appropriate to extend to the private sector. I think in the Equalities Review Trevor Phillips implicitly acknowledged that. We have to show that it is successful before we can extend it. Procurement is different and in that area we are saying it could be a force for good but it needs to be more effectively managed.

Q144 Roger Berry: Given that the duties in relation to both disability and gender are very recent and given that Trevor Phillips has recognised that in relation to race it has not been implemented particularly effectively, are you saying that if, in two or three years' time, the evidence in relation to equality duties on public authorities was seen to be effective then your objection to it being extended to the private sector would be dismissed?

Ms Anderson: It certainly would lead us to reconsider our position. We would have to look at the evidence very carefully but clearly we would want to look at that evidence.

Q145 Chairman: That is obviously one area of potential legislation to deal with some of the issues we have been discussing, but as you now we have the Discrimination Law Review looking at the moment at legislation and we, like others, are slightly bemused by exactly what has happened to it and what it is going to cover. You said earlier that the current legislation is very out-of-date, particularly referring to the current difficulty in the public sector and equal pay. What recommendations would you like the Discrimination Law Review to make? Should we be getting rid of the Equal Pay Act and subsuming it all? How does it tie into single equality legislation? Would you like to expand?

Ms Veale: The key principle things we would want to see, specifically an alignment of the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay because they do not work properly together which is partly what has caused the difficulties that are occurring in the local authority sector. We would also want to see legislation across the piece but aimed at tackling systemic discrimination where it happens. At the moment it is entirely based on an individual complaint led system which is invidious for the individual because they have to put their head above the parapet and risk wrecking their employment relationship with the employer. It is timely, it is litigious, it is difficult, it attracts no win no fee lawyers to all the wrong sorts of cases. You need to have a thorough overhaul of the system and allow it to be much more proactive and use the CEHR's existing new duties that could be used to look at particular areas of obvious discrimination and problem. There are many, many issues for us. There is a whole area of representative actions in the tribunal. It is ludicrous that 50,000 individual claims have to be submitted against one employer for one pay system. That is mad. There are problems with indirect discrimination. We like the Disability Discrimination Act which has a duty to make reasonable adjustments and we can see there is some scope for extending that into other areas of discrimination. You need to be able to make sure that you can tackle multiple discrimination through this new legislation and I think it has to have some proper purpose clause at the beginning with clear objectives set out so that all the detail can be read in the light of clear aims and objectives of where you want to go.

Q146 Chairman: Have we had your most up-to-date position on the legislative changes you would like to see?

Ms Veale: We are ready to go but we have not seen this Green Paper yet.

Q147 Chairman: So you have not submitted anything to them, you are waiting to respond. Do you have a position paper on it that we could see?

Ms Veale: Not publicly available yet I am afraid but as soon as it is we are very happy to share it and it will be on our website. I think everyone is waiting for the Green Paper to set out the parameters.

Q148 Chairman: I think the CBI in your evidence were not making your own proposals, you were more saying that you are waiting to see what is in the Discrimination Law Review. You said things that you did not want to happen as I recall. You did not want the equal pay legislation with the extension of a hypothetical comparator and you wanted to change the way in which equal pay questionnaires were put forward. I am not sure we saw a position from the CBI.

Ms Anderson: We did submit evidence to the Discrimination Law Review and I am very happy to share that with you. As Sarah says, it has been a long time coming and when we see it we will judge it according to the various tests that we have set. I do not think that we are convinced that a major overhaul of the legislation is actually necessary or appropriate. What we would actually hate to see is a lot of little fiddly changes because then actually you are going to have an awful lot of management time spent making small adjustments and public tribunals having to cope with slightly different wording. I think change for change's sake is not good. The legislation is probably about where it should be.

Q149 Chairman: So you do not agree that it is not working as we have been told by a number of organisations and the TUC has just expressed.

Ms Veale: I think we fundamentally disagree on that and I expect you would get two very different types of solution.

Chairman: If we could have from both of you whatever is your most up-to-date position on that, that would be very helpful because obviously this is a very complex area and one that we will need to look at further. I think at that point it is time for us to go and to allow you to leave as well. Thank you very much for coming. It has been most interesting having you both here together which has been a new experience for us and it has saved us having to ask you each the same questions one after the other. Thank you for your time and I am sorry we have had to cram so much into a short period of time on this very, very complex subject, but it has been much appreciated and I think we have managed to get a very good flavour and set of ideas. We will be looking forward to getting any further documents and anything around legislation will be extremely helpful. Thank you very much for your time.