Our strategy - CUH Together incudes a priority to support our staff, with one of the five people priorities being inclusion - we will seek to drive out inequality, recognising that we are stronger when we value difference and inclusion.
In 2017 the UK government published the first report to examine the barriers people from ethnic minorities face in employment, named Race in the workplace. Their report highlighted the need to first be able to measure the disadvantage some ethnic groups face in order to address the barriers to earning as much as their white colleagues.
In 2018, the Race Disparity Unit and CIPD led the call for the introduction of ethnicity pay gap reporting in “Our Manifesto for Work”. This led to the government consultation on whether to introduce mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting, which ran from October 2018 to January 2019. The Women and Equalities Committee published a report calling for the Government to implement mandatory reporting of ethnicity pay by April 2023, however the Government has confirmed they will not be legislating at this time.
CUH is voluntarily and proactively producing an ethnicity pay gap report as part of our approach to improve inclusion and create a fair workplace. In the absence of a mandatory framework for ethnic pay gap reporting, the Trust has aligned with the approach in place for gender pay gap reporting to highlight any inequalities. The Trust is committed to advancing equality of opportunity, regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, age, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy/maternity, sexual orientation, gender reassignment or disability. On this basis, the Trust has a clear policy of paying employees equally for the same or equivalent work, regardless of their ethnicity (or any other characteristic set out above). The Trust has a largely White workforce, like many other NHS organisations, with 65% of the workforce reporting as white, and 30% reporting to be ethnically diverse.
A benchmarking report published by PwC in 2021 highlights that a high level analysis of the ethnicity pay gap can mask disadvantage for specific ethnic groups. We plan to build on our work on ethnicity pay gaps to include further analysis of individual ethnic groups including to identify any disparities amongst the White ethnicity groups.
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