Agenda and minutes

Present: Councillors I Courts (Chairman), M Gough, M Parker, M McLoughlin, L McCarthy and S Caudwell

Officers:   Karen Grant - Head of Equality and Diversity, SMBC

  Paul Rogers - Democratic Services and Scrutiny Officer, SMBC

1.  APOLOGIES

Apologies were received from Councillor R Sleigh OBE and Ms. Maggie Hurt (Co-Opted Member).

No declarations of interest were received.

To answer questions, if any, asked by any resident of the Borough pursuant to Standing Orders

No questions or deputations were received.

To consider for approval the draft Minutes arising from the Remuneration Committee meeting held on 21 July 2021.

RESOLVED:

(i)  That the minutes of the Remuneration Committee meeting held on 21st July 2021 be approved as a correct record.

The Head of Equality and Diversity presented the report. 

Members were informed that statutory gender pay gap reporting was a requirement under the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017.  All public sector organisations employing over 250 employees are required at the  ‘snapshot’ date as at 31 March each year, to upload their of the gender pay gap (GPG) calculations for the previous year to the Government website by 30^th March 2022.

The Council publishes both a narrative report and accompanying action plan, both of which are published and made available via the Council website.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) provisional results as at October 2021 showed that there was a U.K median GPG of 15.4%, which equated to a reduction from 15.5% compared to 2020, and a mean of 14.9% which was a slight increase from 14.6%.

The Council’s mean GPG increased this reporting round from 13.5% to 14.1% and its median GPG from 20.3% to 21.3%. The Council, however, was performing above the West Midlands GPG mean averages.

The data collected shows that the Council has a higher representation of women at 74% in the workforce where there are more men than women at the lower end of the hourly pay scales, which impacts on the Council’s GPG. Furthermore, figures show that more women work flexibly on reduced hours compared with men and that some services reflected gender specific roles, with more women working in areas such as  catering and social care. 

Of the 6 members of the Council’s Corporate Leadership Team (CLT), Members were informed that 4 were women for the reporting year.

The Committee’s attention was drawn to Appendix 1 to the report, ‘Solihull MBC, Gender Pay Gap Report’. The report included details of the Council’s workforce distribution across all Council pay bands as at 31 March 2021, as well as the GPG by Directorate.  The report provided a narrative for progress against the Gender Pay Gap Action Plan to March 2022, which included some completed, on-going and deferred actions, as well as the New Gender Pay Gap Action Plan to March 2023.

Having received the presentation from the Head of Equalities and Diversity, Members of the Remuneration Committee submitted a number of related questions to the report, which in summary included the following matters:

A Member of the Committee noted a passage from the Solihull MBC Gender Pay Gap report Foreword, ‘The Council is not complacent in taking actions to reduce the GPG in the organisation and recognises the importance of working with partners and businesses to work collectively on reducing the gender pay gap in the borough’ and queried why in some instances there were such large discrepancies in the mean/median as detailed in the ASHE survey and to what extent was the Council’s pay gap effected by the borough profile i.e. cultural and employment factors.

The Head of Equalities and Diversity advised Members that work  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5.