At L&C, we're fully committed to building a more diverse and inclusive culture.
By developing our polices across recruitment, retention, promotion and training, we're actively working towards reducing our gender pay gap in the coming years.
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.
The table below shows our mean and median pay and bonus gap on 5th April 2020 as well as comparisons to our 2019 data.
Difference between men and women | ||||
2019/2020 | 2018/2019 | |||
Mean | Median | Mean | Median | |
Pay gap | 25.1% | 26.5% | 25.6% | 23.6% |
Bonus gap | 45.1% | 41.6% | 52.3% | 77.4% |
Difference between men and women - 2019/2020 | ||
Mean | Median | |
Pay gap | 25.1% | 26.5% |
Bonus gap | 45.1% | 41.6% |
Difference between men and women - 2018/2019 | ||
Mean | Median | |
Pay gap | 25.6% | 23.6% |
Bonus gap | 52.3% | 77.4% |
L&C’s gap is higher than the national median gender pay gap of 15.5%1 and it does show an increase from 2018/19.
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, though this is changing on an annual basis. Also in 2019 we deliberately paused our adviser recruitment to evaluate the investment we had made in technology. As such, whilst the proportion of female employees grew in the year it meant there were limited opportunities to join the company to work in roles with greater earning potential.
1. Source: Gender pay gap in the UK: 2020, Office for National Statistics, 3 November 2020
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 charts above show that the number of female colleagues receiving bonus awards continued to reduce in 2019/20. This reflects the change in the remuneration approach for our administrative colleagues, which are populated by a greater proportion of female employees. In 2018 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) increases rather than one off bonus payments.
As we have explained in our previous annual gender pay gap reports, 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:
As per previous reports, L&C remains on a journey and accepts that it will take time to achieve a significant impact on our gender pay gap but remains 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.