The UK is looking at forcing employers to reveal salaries upfront
The government plans to establish an Equal Pay Regulatory and Enforcement Unit, which will help promote equal pay and end pay discrimination.
In April 2025, it launched a call for evidence on a number of areas of equality included in the promised Equality (Race and Disability) Bill. It will now consider the views from the call for evidence to understand the challenges and find the appropriate solutions to equal pay enforcement.
The call for evidence, which ends on 30 June, includes several proposals which businesses, trade bodies, and employees have been invited to comment on.
According to legal firm Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, some of the key proposals include:
- Making the right to equal pay effective for ethnic minorities and disabled people: This includes potentially extending the existing equal pay regime to cover these characteristics.
- Ensuring outsourcing of services cannot be used to avoid equal pay: Potentially by allowing ‘outsourced workers’ to bring equal pay claims, comparing their pay with that of ‘in-house’ employees where they work.
- Improving pay transparency: This includes providing salary ranges in job adverts or before an interview, not questioning job candidates about their salary history, and providing employees with information on pay and how this compares with those doing work of equal value.
- Drafting regulations (under the Employment Rights Bill) to specify steps employers should take to prevent sexual harassment, to include only such steps as have a clear evidence base supporting their efficacy.
The current legal requirements for pay transparency are limited to gender pay gap reporting and, where there has been an equal pay breach, equal pay audits.
Since 2017, organisations with 250 or more employees in Great Britain have been required to publish specific gender pay gap data on their own website and the government reporting service annually. However, this information is limited to comparisons of the average pay and bonuses of men and women across an organisation.
As such, it does not involve the sharing of information about an individual’s pay or an organisation’s pay structure. The government has announced its intention to introduce pay gap reporting on the basis of ethnicity and disability.
It has also begun the process of legislating to introduce a requirement for organisations to publish an equality action plan alongside their gender pay gap data.
