Gender Pay Gap Report 2020
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.
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 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 proportion of men and women in each pay quartile
2019/20
2018/19
The proportion of men and women receiving a bonus payment
2019/20
2018/19
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.
Actions to close the gap
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:
- Reviewing and revising our recruitment policies and procedures to attract more women to the organisation, particularly in sales and senior management roles. During 2019 however these efforts were limited as we made a conscious decision to pause our recruitment for new advisers to reflect the investments we had made in our technology infrastructure. Towards the end of this learning period when recruitment re-commenced we entered into a strategic partnership with a Talent search agency to refresh our recruitment attraction methods. Going forwards this will include introducing a new selection process across the whole company, reflecting our internal values and behaviours.
- 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. Flexible working time arrangements were rolled out across the whole company in 2019 and a colleague working group was established to identify possible changes to the company’s maternity/paternity leave policies. These will continue to be explored and changes made at the appropriate time reflecting the ever-changing needs of the workforce, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the benefits colleagues have experienced from working remotely.
- Continue to embed our company values of being Supportive, Connected, Dynamic and Respectful through a series of ‘rituals’ to enable us to enhance our positive customer-focused culture. One of these rituals is a quarterly all-colleague recognition scheme that identifies and rewards through nominations, colleagues who have displayed our values and behaviours. 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.
- 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 2021.
- 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 individual development plans and specific training interventions.
- Enhancing our line management capability to enable first line managers to support their team members in developing their skills and progressing within L&C. This will include the introduction of a bespoke training programme to provide all managers with the tools and techniques to develop the emotional intelligence side of being a manager.
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.
