My Submission to the Government’s Consultation on Mandatory Ethnicity & Disability Pay Gap Reporting

The government’s consultation on whether ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting should be made mandatory for large employers has now closed. I submitted a response in my capacity as a professional statistician with 7 years experience of helping employers to get to grips with pay gap reporting. My response was in two parts, a briefing note of the 9 statistical challenges that have to be confronted for a workable reporting system to be introduced and my answers to the 33 questions posed by the government in their consultation.

*** This post was updated on 9th June 2025 with links to my final response. Links to my draft response can be found at the end of this post. ***

The Government’s Consultation

The government asked for responses in two forms. First, it posed 33 questions which asked you to select from a 5-point Agree to Disagree scale. It then gave a dozen or so free text boxes where you could expand on your reasons for your selections. There were two links available –

The detailed proposals and what the government wanted to know was here.
The official form to submit your response was here.

My Briefing Note on 9 Statistical Challenges

The government proposal for ethnicity & disability pay gap reporting can be summarised in a single paragraph.

“To compel employers with no stats skills once a year to compare the hourly pay of at least 3 self declared categories of employees with a minimum of 10 people per category plus missing data rates of between 5% and 50% using a pay data set where the standard deviation of hourly pay is typically 50-100% of the mean, publish this data in the public domain, draw wide ranging conclusions from this comparison so as to publish an action plan on which they can be held to account on.”

This is effectively what the government wants employers to do, a challenge many professional statisticians would struggle with. For a workable reporting system to be implemented, the government must first of all consider the 9 statistical & data challenges and decide what is the best way to resolve these. My briefing note describes these challenges in more detail and you can download a PDF version of these using the link below.

EPGR & DPGR Consultation 2025 – 9 Statistical Challenges – A Briefing Note by Nigel Marriott CStat v2

The last section of the note gives an overview of what is currently required from employers reporting their gender pay gaps using two employers (Mars Confectionery and the UK Atomic Energy Authority) as examples. I hope this section is useful to readers who are not familiar with these requirements.

My Response to the Consultation

Here is my submission in PDF format which you can download using the link below. You are more than welcome to reuse what I have written elsewhere.

EPGR & DPGR Consultation 2025 – 33 Questions – Response by Nigel Marriott CStat

There are 8 key points I want the government to take note of.

Put pay quarter breakdowns at the heart of employer reporting.
No mean and median hourly pay gap and bonus pay gap calculations whatsoever.
Minimum of 3 categories of employees to be reported which includes an unknown
Minimum of 50 employees per category, not the proposed 10.
Employer flexibility on how to ask their employees for their ethnicity & disability, which categories to use and which aggregations of small categories to be used.
Link definition of disability to the Equality Act 2010 definition and use reasonable adjustments as basis of any disability categorisation.
- Consider using race pay gap reporting as per EA10 definitions rather than ethnicity pay gap reporting which does not accord with EA10 definitions of race.
Encourage a continuous improvement mentality by getting employers to report what they’ve tried that’s worked and also what’s not worked.
No benchmarking of employers whatsoever in the private sector and minimised in the public sector.

Why the government should be listening to me

When it comes to resolving the statistical and data challenges of employer ethnicity and disability reporting, I consider myself to be the leading statistician in this field. The reasons I make this claim are –

I wrote the draft ethnicity pay gap reporting guidance for employers for the Department of Business & Trade in 2022. The background to this is described here.
I wrote a briefing note for parliamentarians ahead of two parliamentary debates in 2021. My name was mentioned in parliament by Elliot Colburn MP who opened the first debate.
I assisted the Cabinet Office in 2020 in revising the guidance to employers who are required to report their gender pay gaps.
I represented the Royal Statistical Society when giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee in June 2019 on the “Effectiveness of Gender Pay Gap Reporting”.
I have 7 years experience of working with dozens of clients to help them understand & report their pay gaps, write their narratives and to identify priorities & actions to close their gaps.
I run training courses in pay gap analytics for clients and I have written nearly 100 blogs and articles on how to use and interpret pay gap data correctly.
I have 34 years experience of working with over 200+ non-statistical clients (such as HR departments) across many industries, sectors and countries to help them to turn their data into insights and actions.
I am an active fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and was accredited by them as a Chartered Statistician in 2003.
I was admitted as a Member of The Academy of Experts in 2023. My expert witness work dates back to 2007 and I have given evidence in indirect discrimination claims.

Responses made by other organisations

I am not the only respondent. Other individuals and organisations did so and some put their response in the public domain. Unfortunately, the quality of these vary considerably and so here I distinguish between the good, bad and ugly.

The following organisations have made good responses that either make similar points to me or complement what I’ve written in a positive way.

Spktral – Spktral are one of the few organisations out there who like me understand it is imbalances in representation that drive pay gaps. If there are no imbalances, there are no pay gaps. So why not measure and track the imbalances directly rather than using a pay gap statistic which is misunderstood by many and is actionless? Spktral also published a 4-part series on their blog which explains in detail the numerous issues with the existing gender pay gap reporting system and why a reset is needed.

Royal Statistical Society – I am a fellow of the RSS and I asked the CEO if the RSS were interested in responding given the statistical issues. They decided to do so since tackling diversity & inclusion issues is part of their strategy. In their response, the RSS emphasises similar issues to those in my response. In part this is because I sent them an advanced copy of my briefing note of the 9 statistical & data challenges, a document they reviewed and asked me a number of questions about to clarify their thoughts.
- You can also read and comment on their submission on LinkedIn here.

The following organisations have made mixed responses with some good parts mixed with some bad parts.

None identified at present

The following organisations have submitted poor responses that will be harmful to employers who follow their recommendations. If you have contacts with these organisations, please do your best to get them to modify or delete their response.

ShareAction – bluntly they do not have a clue. You can see this from this line in their response “ShareAction has adopted the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)’s recommendation of aligning ethnicity pay gap reporting to gender pay gap reporting as it will minimise additional work and bureaucracy for human resources and payroll teams.” Anyone who actually understands pay gap reporting would instantly know you cannot align ethnicity/disability with gender and the goal of minimising the burden on HR teams is actually a mirage since it will create more work. Anyone who truly understands the statistical challenges of pay gap reporting would know that CIPD do not have a clue as I made clear in this article.

My Draft Response

I posted my draft response on 1st June 2025 and asked for comments and views before I submitted my final response. I would like to thank everyone who responded and your comments helped me realise I needed to say more about what the goal of employer diversity reporting should be about. The links below take you to the PDF versions of my drafts for both my briefing note and my response to the consultation.

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