Gender Pay Gap Report 2019

Background

London & Country Mortgages Ltd (L&C) currently employs over 850 people at its offices in Bath, London and Newcastle. We're publishing our gender pay gap report in accordance with the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations. An important thing to point out is that the gender pay gap is not the same as equal pay. Equal pay is the requirement that all men and women who carry out the same or similar jobs are paid the same. We are confident that men and women are paid equally for doing equal jobs across the organisation.

Our gender pay gap

The table below shows our mean and median pay and bonus gap on 5th April 2019 as well as comparisons to our 2018 data.

While this gap is higher than the national median gender pay gap of 17.3% ¹ it does show a reduction from 2017/18.

The underlying reason for this is that we, like most of the financial services industry, have a higher proportion of men working within our business at all levels of pay – and in particular in higher paid senior, technical and sales roles. In contrast, most of our part time female employees work in administration.

1. Source: Gender pay gap in the UK: 2019, Office for National Statistics, 29 October 2019

This trend is highlighted in the following charts, which show that while the proportion of men is higher in the top three pay quartiles the % of women has continued to increase year on year in the majority of the quartiles.

The proportion of men and women in each pay quartile

2018/19

2017/18

The proportion of men and women receiving a bonus payment

2018/19

2017/18

The charts above show that the number of female colleagues receiving bonus awards has significantly reduced in 2018/19. This reflects the change in remuneration approach for our Administrative colleagues, of which are populated by a greater proportion of female employees. We introduced a revised rewards package that included the consolidation of previous bonus awards into salary along with a quarterly performance scheme that enables colleagues to achieve salary (and therefore pensionable salary) increases rather than one off bonus payments.

Action to close the gap

We remain committed to ensuring that everyone has an equal chance to fulfil their career aspirations and potential at L&C – whatever their gender. We continue to work on building a more diverse and inclusive culture. To do this, we are focusing on the following key areas:

1. 1. Reviewing and revising our recruitment policies and procedures to attract more women to the organisation, particularly in sales and senior management roles. In 2019, through collaboration with all our colleagues, we introduced our first set of internal company values and behaviours in a first step towards creating a compelling Employer Brand. We are now working with external partners to revise our approach to both internal and external recruitment and role selection to better identify and appoint candidates who, as well as having the motivation and technical capability, will also demonstrate and align to our values and behaviours.
2. 2. Continue undertaking regular colleague engagement surveys seeking colleague views on flexible working (amongst other matters) to enable us to review our flexible working policy and practices to help our employees manage their work/life balance and meet their family commitments, while continuing to meet the needs of our customers – in 2019 three of our functional areas successfully introduced flexi-time working arrangements that enabled colleagues to achieve an element of personal flexibility allowing them time to better manage their lives. In 2020 these arrangements will be rolled out across the rest of the company.
3. 3. Embedding our new company values of being Supportive, Connected, Dynamic and Respectful through a series of ‘rituals’ to enable us to enhance our positive customer focussed culture. We will continue to work on ways to enable us to evaluate and recognise performance on both the outputs, e.g. What has been delivered, as well as inputs, e.g. How a colleague’s behaviour has influenced their performance.
4. 4. Continuing to review and adapt our reward policies and practices to recognise the different skills and behaviours required by a company of our size. This will include a review of both our Adviser and Administrative colleagues’ pay structures during 2020.
5. 5. Undertaking an exercise to identify colleagues who display potential for the future – building a pipeline of colleagues, at all levels of our business, who could fulfil more senior positions throughout the company, supporting them with mentors and individual development plans.
6. 6. Enhancing our line management capability to enable our first line managers to support their team members to develop their skills and progress within L&C.

As per last year’s report, we are on a journey and accept that it will take time to achieve a significant impact on our gender pay gap but remain committed to doing so to create a fulfilling and inclusive working environment for all our current and prospective colleagues.

Andrew Thomas, HR Director

Note: We confirm that our data is accurate and has been calculated according to the requirements of The Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017.