Uncorrected Evidence 400

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Trade and Industry Committee

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

on Monday 29 October 2007

Members present

Judy Mallaber, in the Chair

Roger Berry

Mrs Claire Curtis-Thomas

Miss Julie Kirkbride

________________

Witnesses: Rt Hon Harriet Harman, QC, MP, Minister for Women, Ms Janice Shersby, Director of Government Equalities Office and Ms Ann-Marie Field, Head of Gender Equality Policy of the Government Equalities Office, gave evidence.

Q197 Chairman: Welcome. It is very nice to see you. I hope you are feeling better. We were contemplating, are we meant to call you Secretary of State, Minister, Leader, we are not quite sure. Secretary of State, I think. Would you like to introduce your colleagues who are with you.

Ms Harman: Thank you very much indeed. I do apologise for my no-show last week. I have with me today Janice Shersby, who is Head of the Government Equalities Office, and Ann-Marie Field, who is responsible for gender within that office.

Q198 Chairman: Thank you very much. As you know, last year the Trade and Industry Committee started looking at equal pay and the pay gap, particularly looking at occupational segregation and the link into the lack of people with skills in the economy. We did a report and said we would return to it when we had the Women and Work Report, which we have now been looking at, and what has been done in relation to the recommendations in it. If we can start off by asking you what you would regard as being the most significant of the Women and Work Commission's recommendations for tackling gender inequality in the workplace and why?

Ms Harman: Thank you, Judy. Perhaps I can say that I very much welcome the attention which this Select Committee has paid to this area of work, and I feel progress is made by everybody keeping a sharp focus on it. I am not sure I could pick out one particular thing of the Women and Work Commission, but perhaps I might get back to them. I think it is really a combination of a whole range of activities taken in a whole range of ways and it is also a whole range of organisations keeping a focus on this issue which will take us further forward. That is rather ducking the question about one particular one. If I could say the reason why I think this area of work is so important is, firstly, because of the principle of fairness. I think we would all agree it is wrong for people who are at work to be paid unfairly on the grounds of their gender, so there is a straightforward principle issue. There is also a whole range of other issues, like if we want to tackle child poverty we have to tackle low pay amongst women, if we want to have a sensible efficient labour market then it does not make sense for occupational segregation to exclude or deter a whole swathe of people, so it makes economic good sense. There is a whole range of issues which need to be addressed and, therefore, I cannot pick out one particular one.

Q199 Miss Kirkbride: Tempting you a little further to make a decision about what is the most important, a lot of the focus on equal pay is on encouraging women to do more of the jobs traditionally done by men and if we did more of the jobs traditionally done by men, which are paid better, we would then begin to diminish the pay gap. Is that the most important way forward or is an equal or, perhaps, more important way forward to focus on the skills which women already have and encourage them to upgrade them throughout their own career, ie should we be steering women towards doing the non-traditional women's jobs or should we be getting women better trained and focusing on what they already do and like doing?

Ms Harman: I think there is a fair evaluation of the work which is traditionally done by women, that is a very important thing, that there are a lot of women doing work which is clearly undervalued, otherwise you have got to accept that a part-time woman is worth 40% per hour less than a full-time man. Therefore, part of it is about us doing what we can to make sure the work which is traditionally done by women is not undervalued. Even without women training for further opportunities, even without women going into work which is traditionally done by men, there is something which needs to be done just about how women doing jobs which are traditionally done by women are valued in terms of the amount of pay they get. The question about jobs traditionally done by men is very much an issue for young boys and girls in school and people newly into the labour market because, of course, the nature of work is completely changing. Work which might have been traditionally done by men in factories that might have been regarded as very heavy manual work will often involve the use of computers now, like in a warehouse which might have involved masses of lifting huge amounts which does not involve any because of machinery. I think we need to try and think afresh about what are traditional male jobs because the work in those traditional male areas is changing because of new technology. The third point in relation to training and upgrading of women in terms of them getting on in their jobs is it is important for people to have as much choice as possible about the areas they work in and that we have as little preconceptions and stereotyping of jobs. I also think one of the key areas for women is the inability for women in part-time work to take training opportunities and to get advancement, the difficulty of the labour market recognising that somebody is just as committed to their job even if they work fewer hours and, therefore, are just as worthy of promotion and extra training, so I would say those three issues.

Q200 Miss Kirkbride: Out of interest, what occupations would you identify as being the ones which are undervalued in terms of their male comparative roles?

Ms Harman: I would think caring.

Q201 Miss Kirkbride: Which should be compared with what traditional male role?

Ms Harman: If you look across the whole range of people at work in any particular sector where there are men and women working together, occupationally segregated but within the same employer, you will see women who perhaps have the same levels of qualifications but being lower paid, as I say particularly if they are likely to be in caring work. I would say traditionally, and this is just a generalisation, the skills, commitment and experience which people bring to work for caring, whether it is for children or older people, have been undervalued. That has changed quite a lot recently with the focus on the importance of people working with young children, but there is still a backlog.

Q202 Chairman: Can I ask you about structures because we identify the same factors over and over again of some of the causes for inequality in the workplace, be it on pay or other issues, and the question is how we do something about it. Your own Women and Equality Unit has jumped around from department to department, the Minister for Women jumps around and now I am trying to get my head around the press release on what the Government Equalities Office is and your role within that and, for example, how that ties in with having a Sub-Committee on Equalities chaired by Ed Miliband. What do you see as your role, and do you think you have got the clout and the power to be able to drive the gender equalities issue across departments? We have been slightly confused as to which ministers to invite here. We have tried three different departments and we ended up writing to all of them. Do you have the power to make it happen, and what are the structures which might enable us to get over some of the blockages that we have had in the past?

Ms Harman: Because the Government is committed to tackling inequality, to tackling discrimination, to tackling child poverty and unfairness, there is an overriding political imperative for whatever machinery we have to work. You can sometimes have the most brilliant machinery and without the political commitment nothing happens, or you can have an asymmetry of approach but it works to deliver. I do think the current structure we have got is disappointing if people do not know who to contact in terms of outside organisations or select committees or parliamentary colleagues. It is a problem if people do not know who to contact, but I hope whatever point people arrive at they meet a willingness within government to take these issues very seriously and take them forward. I regard this as one of the most important things that I am here to do in government.

Q203 Chairman: I do not think the problem is knowing who to contact, we know that if we want to look at how we deal with segregation or models coming out during schooling we should talk to the schools department, if we want to look at apprenticeships we go somewhere else, so we know that it requires action in every department, that is the whole nature of the issue. The question we would ask is how do we make sure there is sufficient imperative across departments to put it higher up in the agenda. Do you think we have got it right? Is that your job or is your job something different from that? How will the Equalities Office operate in relation to that? Will it be interfering in every different department or will it have a different role?

Ms Harman: Yes, it certainly will be, and that is a very important part of my job. I do not know whether Janice wants to say something at this point as well about it is actual ways of working.

Ms Shersby: Of course we have informal ways of working with our colleagues across government, but we do also have, and will have, some more formal structures to take forward our equalities work. Perhaps, in particular, it might be worth mentioning the Equalities Public Service Agreement, which includes an indicator on the gender pay gap. That puts the gender pay gap at the heart of the PSA agreements which will be taken forward over the next three years. For that particular piece of work we will, for example, have a programme board chaired by our Director General which will bring together departments that have agreed to work with us to help us deliver that. On other issues, for example working with colleagues on the Minister for Women's priorities, we have some more informal arrangements at the moment, but those are arrangements we have worked through with those colleagues who are most directly involved in helping us on those priorities and those are very close working relationships.

Q204 Roger Berry: Secretary of State, the Government's response to the Commission's report last September, the Action Plan, has been criticised by a number of people on the grounds that the response was somewhat short on details. It is true that most of the 40 recommendations were accepted by the Government, but then virtually all of the recommendations had no timescales attached to them at all. The partially accepted ones tended to be ones which involved public spending. For example, the �5 million modernisation fund to support capacity building for equality reps, that was partially accepted. Do you accept that a real action plan has got to have timetables and specific commitments for it to be truly credible? With a bit of hindsight, was not the Government's Action Plan last year a bit vague?

Ms Harman: The first thing an action plan stands or falls by is the policy objective. I think there was a view which could have been taken that perhaps the policy objective could have been a bit tougher or a bit sharper and could have been more ambitious. I am certainly looking not just at how we are taking forward the existing Action Plan in terms of making sure that it has got timescales, resources behind it, and milestones, but whether or not our response is sufficient to the task that we regard as so important. I am looking afresh at whether or not we have been ambitious enough because I think we probably need to be more ambitious in terms of the pace of change we expect and the amount of commitment we are prepared to give to it across government.

Q205 Roger Berry: I welcome that reply. That seems to suggest that in terms of the objectives and the strategy, that is reasonably clear, the various components of that, but are you acknowledging that we do need timetables to achieve each of these objectives, there is no point in just saying, "Well, we are going to have a look at this and we might do more here and there", there will be timetables which indicate when certain things will be undertaken and also there has got to be the appropriate funding?

Ms Harman: Yes.

Q206 Roger Berry: That was absent last September in the Government's Action Plan, was it not?

Ms Harman: I do think we could look again at how we give people more of a sense of confidence and certainty of the progress which is going to be made on this. People are entitled to expect that we do not have just commitment but that we have some real timescales against which people can measure progress backed up by resources. Ann-Marie, would you like to add anything on that point?

Ms Field: One of the main reasons for not having a comprehensive timetable - and I agree, it would be a very useful thing to have just to keep track of things, apart from anything else, over 40 recommendations - was there was such a wide range of issues in there, things like the ten-year childcare strategy and the strategy for the Olympics for 2012. Of course, there are some things we have already achieved, or have already set up, and they were reported in the one-year on report which we did in April this year. For instance, the Equality Part-Time Work Fund is already underway, the projects are underway, and we are already starting to see results from that. We probably do need to set it out as more of a milestones and timetable but I would not want the progress we have made to be ignored as well.

Ms Harman: Perhaps we can do that by way of an interim situation.

Q207 Chairman: Was anything extra done as a result of that and the report or, from what Ann-Marie is saying, do you think there was a number of things in train anyway and inevitably that was going to be reflected in both the report and the response? Do you feel action has happened in new areas as a result of their report?

Ms Harman: As a result of the Women and Work Commission Report?

Q208 Chairman: Yes.

Ms Harman: Yes, absolutely. It has brought a focus that there might not have otherwise been, but could we do more, yes, I am sure we could do more. I think we will take that as a suggestion, we should take stock and get back and update on that. Discussions go on all the time. For example, I have just been discussing with David Lammy how things are taken forward within his department and I know you have talked to him. I have just been discussing with John Healey how he takes forward questions of equal pay within local government. Discussions are going on all the time, but I think it is very important that we do be outward facing in our reporting on where we have got to on all of this and, also, keep asking ourselves is it time to up the objectives.

Q209 Roger Berry: If, for example, we were looking at a local council's Equality Action Plan, we would expect timescales and specific targets. All I am saying is, as politely as I can, if a local authority had produced an action plan response like this with very little in terms of specific commitments to meet specific targets by specific points in time, we would probably say, "It's a bit vague. Go back and try again", and that is what I am politely trying to convey. I think you have accepted that point.

Ms Harman: We have definitely received that point and we will come back to you with that via the Chairman, perhaps.

Roger Berry: Thank you.

Q210 Chairman: We had a number of questions we were going to ask you about legislation, which we will come back to later on. As in Business Questions last week you implied that responses you had received on the consultation paper on the Single Equality Bill had raised issues which were maybe rather more radical than could be embraced in coming forward with an immediate Equality Bill ready for Parliament. It suggested that you were likely to go further than what was in the Discrimination Law Review and, indeed, many of the responses we have received have suggested that the Discrimination Law Review as it stands does not go far enough. Following that response, can you tell us what areas of policy you are reconsidering and whether, indeed, you are planning to go very much further and make many more changes than were suggested in the review?

Ms Harman: The notion of a Single Equality Bill is basically as its name says, it is a consolidation exercise, a consolidation of lots of different bits which have gone over the latter half of the last century and this century. The initial concept was that it would be a consolidation exercise. If you have had 50 years or so of bits of legislation, it is important that you do pull it all together, so I think consolidation is not an unworthy thing to be doing. The idea that all we can do is consolidate rather than look to make further progress I am certainly questioning and that was certainly questioned in many of the responses we had. Basically people were saying, "Yeah, it's good to consolidate and we're glad to see you're consolidating, but aren't there a few more things that legislation can contribute to in terms of the path towards equality?" Therefore, there are a number of areas where people have made particular representations, and I would say those are to do with equal pay and the frustration that 40 years after the equal pay gap we are not making enough progress on narrowing the equal pay gap and what contribution could legislation make. Secondly, that if there is a public commitment to equality, are we mobilising procurement sufficiently to help us deliver on that objective, and might there be a legislative contribution in terms of public procurement. That is an issue which has been raised. The other has been the question of transparency on pay as to how, at your own workplace or through your trade union, you can combat pay inequality if you cannot see it. There have been a lot of proposals into us about transparency and pay inequality between men and women. There are other areas which have been put forward, but I would say those are the main ones on gender.

Q211 Chairman: Are they ones you are expecting to make movement on?

Ms Harman: They are the ones where representations have been made and, as you will know, there are a number of different government departments involved in that and there might be discussions about that going on. I do not want to be cryptic, but I have not got policy agreement which I can put forward to you, otherwise I would.

Q212 Chairman: We can say that you have indicated these are areas which are being looked at very seriously?

Ms Harman: If you have got a consultation and the response to the consultation tells you that you could do more than what you were planning to do, the whole point about consultation is to cognise that, and if you see there is a general will to do something and there are good arguments for doing it, you should. That is what has led people to think, is it a bad thing that we are not having a draft Bill, does that represent a weakening of our commitment to equality? Actually, it represents a potential commitment to strengthening it because if we were going to change the policy, we would not be able to draft the Bill in time to have it ready and drafted by February.

Q213 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: You will be aware that the GLA and the ODA have in place some particularly novel contractual requirements with regard to women. These contractual requirements do not only relate to the pay issues around the employment of women but also provide women with an opportunity, in fact, to participate in training programmes, skill development programmes and, also, to procure work. What opportunity do you think there is or what ambition do you have with regard to public departments, with specific reference to the large spending departments, reflecting the good practices that the ODA have in their contracts and their procurement?

Ms Harman: They have made a very good step forward on that and, as you will know, the Treasury, I think it was, motivated the establishment of the National Employment Panel. They are looking at the role of public procurement in relation to equality in relation to ethnicity, but when they come forward with their findings there is no reason why there should not be a read-across from the proposals they put forward in relation to ethnicity to gender as well. People do find it hard to understand when there is so much power by way of spending, in getting goods and services, that it is not mobilised to the public policy objective. I think that is very important indeed, and I await the National Employment Panel's work which is going to be very important when it comes out. Looking at what has already been done by the ODA and the GLA, I think we have got progress to make on procurement.

Q214 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I would have liked a bit more of an assertive response to that which tried to embrace different government departments because the Government is the biggest procurer in the UK today. My experience of procurement, particularly in areas which are male orientated, so where you have very little presence of women, is that there is spectacularly no reference to the inclusion of women or consideration of women within those contracts. The discussions we have had with the ODA have said, "Yes, these requirements are within our contracts but currently they are not weighted when that contract is considered". The duty is there but compliance with the duty is not weighted when it comes to awarding a contract. Half a step forward is better than no step at all, and that is great, but, in fact, with government departments we have not even made half a step forward. That is an explicit requirement to ensure that you have an equal opportunities policy with regard to women, and there is tangible evidence there, is there not, but there is not a duty to recruit women, or people from ethnically diverse backgrounds, explicitly listed within the contract. I would rather hope that as Minister for Women you would be saying to our colleagues across government departments, "I would like to see this put in as a minimum because it is only a half-way step", because once we have made that step we then have to make that a consideration when awarding contracts. Is that something you have possibly considered? If it is not something you have considered this far, is it something you might be persuaded to consider and what sort of evidence do you need in order to do that?

Ms Harman: Obviously if you do want to make progress you have to use all the levers which are there at your disposal. This is a huge lever which has almost been outside the limits of what it is expected Government ought to be thinking about, that you look not just at the competence of somebody to perform the contract, you look not just at the cost in terms of the price of the contract but you look also at how you can achieve other Government objectives at the same time. This is very much an issue under consideration. Then the question will be, how is this carried out just by action short of legislation and what sort of role would legislation have to play in it? Obviously there are things which can be done without legislation in the public sector if they are not prohibited, but then there are some things which perhaps are prohibited that might need to be made lawful.

Q215 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Minister, you will be aware that the Mayor's Bill had within it a specific clause which mandated the Mayor to execute an agenda equality programme. It is actually within that Bill, which is why he has been able to deliver gender equality in his activities. Therefore, I would suggest it has, in fact, provided the outcome which we would all seek and maybe without legislation we will not make a lot of progress with respect to government departments.

Ms Harman: Sometimes something is expressly prohibited and, therefore, you need legislation to move the prohibition. Sometimes the law is not clear and, therefore, people who do not want to do anything say it is not okay and you sometimes need a legal change to clarify the situation. Sometimes law is not needed, it is just that people are not doing it. There are three positions on that. Whether or not the Mayor could have done it without that legislative encouragement is an open question. Obviously it makes it clearer that he should, but possibly he could have done it without it anyway.

Q216 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Presumably we would be doing it as well under that basis but, of course, we are not and he is.

Ms Harman: We are not at the moment.

Q217 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Perhaps we need that sort of incentive then.

Ms Harman: I do not think anybody should ever take risks and act outside the law, but sometimes if there is even any possibility at all that something might be subject to legal challenge, however unmeritorious the legal challenge, the sense that, therefore, you fall back in front of it and you cannot therefore do something, there are two ways of dealing with that. One is just going on ahead with it and saying, "See you in court because we think we're right and you're wrong", and the other is to change the law to clarify it.

Q218 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Yes, but companies will say, "If you don't legislate, we're not required to do it, and if we do it and our competitors don't, that makes us relatively uncompetitive in comparison with them", and that is why it has not been done.

Ms Harman: If we are talking about the public sector, the public sector does not ---

Q219 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: We are talking about procurement.

Ms Harman: Yes, but it is about the public sector procuring ---

Mrs Curtis-Thomas: From the private sector, exactly, and they will say, "If you don't legislate we won't do it because we lose out relative to our competition", and that is why they do not do it. Thank you.

Q220 Chairman: In capacities outwith this particular inquiry this Committee keeps getting contradictory messages back when we visit Brussels and when we have people before us on what you can and cannot do, so if you are able to get any clarity on it that would be greatly welcomed.

Ms Harman: To finish your point, Claire, if they were asked to do it by the public sector procurer and they did not do it, then they would not get the contract.

Q221 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: But they are not required to do it at the moment.

Ms Harman: But if you make it a requirement of the tendering process by a particular public sector procurer, if the public sector procurer says, "I am only going to contract with people who promise to do X, Y and Z or who offer to do A, B and C", then it is not down to the private sector person who is tendering because they will not get their foot in the door because they will not have complied with the tender requirements.

Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Minister, with respect, there is a cost associated to that and sometimes the cost is prohibitive, and not only the cost but the lack of services or lack of facilities which women can provide, which means that you may put that clause into a contract but it is almost impossible for the contractor to deliver it. At that point they say, "Thanks ever so much but we can't do this", and as an intelligent procurer you will go, "No, okay, I understand that. Thanks very much. We'll go with what we have". That is the reality of procurement for the ODA and the GLA, that they would like to do it but there is insufficient supply in the market to satisfy the demand. Until we have a legislative programme put in place which sends a bigger signal across the marketplace that we require these services, we require specific gender services, you will not get them, there simply is not enough impetus in the market to pull it forward.

Q222 Chairman: We look forward with great interest to seeing your future deliberations on it. Can I go back quickly to what Janice was saying about the Public Service Agreement number 15, of which I have a copy. The Women and Equality Unit put forward the previous Gender Equality Public Service Agreement in 2002, revamped in 2004. What happened to it? Did it have any effect?

Ms Shersby: It is still being worked on and there has been progress made. It was a very differently constructed Public Service Agreement. I think it had about 19 different indicators across a whole range of activities. Some of those indicators have shown progress, others have not shown as much progress as we would want, and at the end of the period we will report on its progress. We are still working on it, but the new PSA is more focused on a limited number of indicators and focuses specifically on the gender pay gap.

Q223 Chairman: It does supersede that presumably because that is the guidance against which the Comprehensive Spending Review and all of that has been set and it also crosses all of the areas of inequality. Does that mean we lose our previous 19 objectives? We had one great thing which we did as much as we could but did not finish and now that goes down the swanny because we have got something which has taken over from it?

Ms Shersby: No. The Gender PSA was for the existing Spending Review period, the Equalities PSA is for the new performance period. It will not supersede it precisely, it will follow it.

Q224 Chairman: As we know, one of our difficulties is all the targets and objectives we are trying to set are mostly very long-term, we are talking about things which are difficult to shift. Do you consider there is a difficulty in chopping and changing every three years with a different set of objectives, a different set of targets and, what is more, now having to subsume it within a broader PSA covering the other areas of inequality?

Ms Shersby: There are two things to say. One relates to the Equalities PSA. In choosing the gender pay gap as one of its indicators, as we have discussed, it will require us to focus on a whole range of different areas in order to make movement on that one indicator. What we have tried to do in the new PSA is to choose good indicators, indicators which in order to influence will require us to take action with a range of departments and partners across a range of measures rather than looking at a whole range of 19 different indicators. The second thing to say is, perhaps, this new Equalities PSA will sit alongside action in other departments on equality embedded within their own PSAs. For example, in education there will be activity in relation to ethnic minority children in education. We have not had to take everything into our own PSA, there is some activity on equality right across Government in other PSAs as well.

Q225 Miss Kirkbride: The Towards a Fairer Future report and the steering group which came out of it was expected to develop the gender equality check by early summer 2007 with the roll-out intended for now. Has it?

Ms Field: Yes, we have developed a tool. I chaired a steering group which had membership from the CBI, TUC, all of the people basically who the Women and Work Commission recommended should be involved in it. We have developed a tool to be piloted and I hope it is going to be piloted on the Business Link website next month. It is specifically for small and medium-sized enterprises, basically companies that do not have their own large HR departments to carry out these sorts of checks. It is quite a simple, straightforward tool. It is in three phases. There is a business case for why you should do this, then there is a series of questions - they take about ten or 15 minutes to work through, so hopefully that would not put too many employers off - and then there is guidance for what you might do if you find there is a problem. We are going to pilot this with the help of the CBI and the British Chamber of Commerce for about three months and hopefully tweak it to make sure it is really fit for purpose and then it will go out live on the Business Link website.

Q226 Miss Kirkbride: That is your first idea to come up with as to how to increase pay transparency with a view to other ideas or do you have other ideas you are working on?

Ms Field: As the Minister said, that is something which is still under discussion as far as the Equality Bill is concerned, but we want to start making some progress with the equality check tool before then.

Q227 Miss Kirkbride: Can the Minister give us some idea of her own thinking on whether or not private companies should have compulsory pay audits for gender?

Ms Harman: I think transparency is important because that generates the ability for people to reflect in their own workplace as to whether or not the system is working fairly, so that is certainly the case.

Q228 Miss Kirkbride: Can we be clear on what transparency means because obviously there is going to be a question of confidentiality of salaries. Are we talking about transparency in pay? What transparency are you offering there, that the average pay for women in this workplace is X and for men it is Y, or are we just saying that payrolls should be available for inspection by employees?

Ms Harman: Obviously there is a question of personal privacy and, therefore, that might affect very small firms if what you did was look at what the average pay for a man is and what the average pay for a woman is in a particular firm, but when it is not a very small place then I think one bit of information which is not currently available on request is the question of what is the average pay for men and what is the average pay for women in a particular enterprise or organisation. That is one end of the scale, which is just the average pay for a man and the average pay for a woman in a particular organisation. Then there is the other end of the scale, which is very comprehensive job evaluations and a complete review of all the elements of every bit of work that is done in any particular job and a kind of revamped job evaluation scheme.

Q229 Miss Kirkbride: Are you personally in favour of compulsory pay audits in the private sector?

Ms Harman: I do think it is important that there is more openness, I would say that.

Q230 Miss Kirkbride: Openness rather than compulsion?

Ms Harman: You can have compulsion to openness.

Q231 Miss Kirkbride: Yes, but they do not mean the same thing though, do they?

Ms Harman: Yes, they do.

Q232 Miss Kirkbride: One gives you information but it does not all means, whereas the other could.

Ms Harman: The question is what produces the end. Does giving people information that they can then take forward in their own workplace, because it opens up something which is previously not available publicly, the best tool, or is the best tool having somebody in completely reviewing the whole thing and then saying, "Actually, we've done a job evaluation and, by the way, everybody is completely fairly evaluated", which could still leave you with a big pay gap.

Q233 Miss Kirkbride: Obviously it begs further questions, but I think they will be covered in other questions as to what tools you will give people to enforce more equal pay if they know they are not being paid equally, and we will come on to that later.

Ms Harman: As I say, this discussion comes when we are in the middle of considering the consultation responses and have not published our response to those consultations, which will be by way of what we think will need to be legislated. That is the stage at which this has come. I am not planning to be opaque about it, but the Government has not taken a position yet which I can then report to you. You asking me what my personal view is is a very tempting suggestion, but obviously what really matters is what is the Government's position and what is the Government going to do by way of legislation or by way of not legislating and that is obviously what we are focusing on.

Miss Kirkbride: Minister, I am sure you have a considerable influence!

Q234 Chairman: Can we pick up on discrimination law, but you may or may not be able to answer any of these questions. Most of the witnesses we have had have thought that equal pay legislation is failing. We have got this massive number of equal pay cases and a number of examples of ways of dealing with it have been brought forward. At the moment, do you have any views at all on some of the suggestions, like having hypothetical comparators, if you have got occupational segregation you cannot compare yourself; representative actions, those two? Are you able to say anything on your thinking on those at the moment? Are some of those proposals which have been put forward for toughening up legislation issues you are looking at?

Ms Harman: We are looking at them because there has been a weight of representations on them with a lot of strong argument behind them, but I am unable to say whether or not the Government is going to take them forward. The consultation process has evoked responses on both those points.

Q235 Chairman: You also just said you were talking to John Healey about the local government situation, which is difficult, can you tell us any more about whether you are in a position to be able to assist with unravelling it?

Ms Harman: As you will know, with the Treasury, John Healey has just agreed an extra �500 million capitalisation available in order to help those local authorities that have not yet settled their equal pay back-claims, but I think we need to get more information from local government as to exactly what the amount which yet remains to be settled is. I know John Healey, together with my deputy, Barbara Follett, is looking forward to meeting the Local Government Association to make sure we have proper up-to-date information about how many claims are outstanding, how many authorities have yet to settle, the extent of the gap currently remains after the �500 million is made available and what sort of progress we are going to make. I think we are expecting to have a much clearer idea when that information is there. Obviously this is individual local authority's responsibility but the Government is very committed to ensuring the situation is sorted out and we do not have unsettled back-claims and unions feeling unable to negotiate because the situation is not settled.

Chairman: I know you are in a rush, but if I can ask Roger to very quickly touch on the equality duties; that is a very important aspect.

Q236 Roger Berry: Can I start off with the new public sector gender equality duty. What is being done to monitor government departments in relation to that duty?

Ms Field: The EOC did some initial work looking at the gender equality schemes which have been drawn up. I have to say, they were not that impressed with some of them, although they did hold some of them up as examples of good practice.

Q237 Roger Berry: Which are the ones they were not impressed with?

Ms Field: A few of the government departments, I think. I will not name any.

Ms Harman: Go on!

Ms Field: They did name the London Development Agency as being an example of good practice, which I think is good because obviously the RDAs have got a role to play in this.

Q238 Roger Berry: Cutting to the chase, historically some government departments have been very good and some have been notoriously bad. Historically, the MoD has dragged its feet on gender, disability and orientation. It has always been at the back of the field on every single equalities issue. Can we have confidence that given this new public sector gender equality duty - okay, it has only been there for six months but it is important it is there - there will be serious monitoring of all government departments to ensure they take it seriously?

Ms Harman: I think the answer to that is yes and the key thing is there is not a requirement for a policy but there is a requirement for some outcome. What we do not want to do is simply have been generating massive exercises in policy formulation. What we need to do is make sure there is a bottom line of outcome which is monitored and progress against that is monitored. I think that is a question of being very clear and quite simplified in it, so that it is not all lost in a thicket of every single complexity, which then means that no progress is made about anything. That has bedevilled progress in this area in quite a lot of respects. It is an opportunity for people who are not really committed to it, and I do not mean it malevolently, but just to get bogged down in discussions of policies and that then gives the objective a bad name.

Q239 Roger Berry: The Green Paper, the Discrimination Law Review, was suggesting a single public sector equality duty which, as we all know, was criticised by a number of strands in the equalities debate. Can we assume that one of the things which is being looked at again is whether it is sensible to subsume the gender equality duty, the race equality duty, the disability equality duty and so forth into one single equality duty? Is that being reviewed because it might be difficult to measure performance if there is just one single public sector equality duty?

Ms Harman: The last thing we want is to create any sort of sense that the proposals for legislation represented in some strands a weakening of duties and obligations. That being the case, and people being relatively clear about what the existing strands and duties stand for, then it seems to me there is no point, for the sake of it, putting everything into one single duty if we can keep a clear focus on the individual strands and keep those duties. I do not think there is any point for the sake of it. Although there are some very cross-cutting issues, there are also some issues which are not cross-cutting and are particular to disability or particular to race or particular to gender. The answer to your question is we have taken on board those proposals which have come forward from the consultation that say people are unhappy with putting it all into one in case it involves a sense of weakening of some of them within that.

Q240 Roger Berry: Thank you very much.

Ms Harman: I sound like one of those policy documents, but you get the point anyway!

Roger Berry: Yes.

Q241 Miss Kirkbride: The thing which has come out most from our inquiry is that the biggest issue in the gender pay gap is access to quality part-time work and if we can crack that one, we can really make a difference. I wonder whether you have alighted on any ideas or proposals which could bring that forward in a constructive way.

Ms Harman: That is an issue for the public sector as an employer. Bear in mind the public sector is a very big employer and, therefore, has within its own hands a big question of availability of jobs at all levels being part-time but, also, availability of flexibility, so there is not part-time versus full-time but there is ability for people to choose the hours which suit their family responsibilities but enables them to carry out their work, unless the employer could show that it really is not possible. There is scope within the public sector as an employer, but there is also the question of the legislation. As you will know, we have introduced the right to request flexible work, and I think there is a big recognition that perhaps more could be done by employers to allow employees to work flexibly in a way that does not disadvantage the employer or the work which is done in the enterprise, but does help women and men balance their family responsibilities, not just for children but also increasingly for older relatives. I think this is going to be a very, very important agenda for the future. People have woken up to the issue that people at work are somebody's parents, somebody's mother or somebody's father, but everybody needs to wake up to the fact that people at work are also somebody's son or daughter and they are getting older and they are not living in residential care or not living in sheltered accommodation or not living with their family, they are living on their own and, nonetheless, they need family support. That is something I would like to signal which we feel we need to look further at, both in terms of the rights of employees to be able to take the initiative to create that balance for themselves but also in terms of the support services that are available in the community which back people up at work. For people with children, it is their right to work flexibly and it is the after-school clubs and holiday play schemes and childcare. We need the same movement on the agenda, not just in relation to older children but also older relatives and people with disabilities.

Q242 Chairman: Thank you very much and thank you for coming. I hope we have not put back your progress from getting back to good health. It has been such a quick canter through the issues and we should have spent three times as long on every single one of them and many more, but thank you very much. As your parting shot, given that the equal pay gap is so intractable, is it a hopeless cause or are you optimistic that we are going to crack it?

Ms Harman: No, I do not think it is at all intractable. It is certainly not that the pay gap is on tablets of stone and there is nothing we can do about it, quite the opposite. It is just that it comes at a difficult time for me to be able to say that this is what the Government's position is because the Government's position is as what you knew it was hitherto until such time as it is changed. I certainly do think, is it one of those things where we just have to wring our hands and say, "We can't do anything more about it and let's engage in lots of processes, but be agnostic as to whether or not the processes are working", well, the answer to that is absolutely not. We have got to focus on the outcome and I am sure we can.

Chairman: Thank you very much, indeed, and thank you for coming.