Background

London & Country Mortgages Ltd (L&C) currently employs over 900 people at our three main 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 2018 as well as comparisons to our 2017 data.

This gap is higher than the national median gender pay gap of 17.9% 1.

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: 2018, Office for National Statistics, 25 October 2018

This trend is highlighted in the following charts, which show that whilst the proportion of men is significantly higher in the top three pay quartiles the % of women is increasing year on year.

The proportion of men and women in each pay quartile

2017/18

2016/17

The proportion of men and women receiving a bonus payment

2017/18

2016/17

The chart above shows that 2% fewer women than men received a bonus in 2017/18 which is an improvement of 4% from the previous year.

Action to close the gap

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

1. Reviewing and revising our recruitment policies and procedures to attract more women to the organisation, particularly in sales and senior management roles – in 2018 this has seen us creating a new recruitment video featuring Eve who was nationally recognised in 2018 by the Industry as a Rising Start for the future, as well as appointing a number of women into several key Board and Executive positions.
2. Undertaking our first colleague engagement survey seeking colleague views on flexible working (amongst other matters) to enable us to reviewing our flexible working policy to help our employees to manage their work/life balance and meet their family commitments, whilst continuing to meet the needs of our customers.
3. Developing a suite of company values 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. Continuing to review and adapt our reward policies and practices to recognise the different skills and behaviours required by a company of our size.
5. Undertaking a succession planning exercise to identify talent at all levels of our company that could fulfil our senior management positions in the future – planning and providing the necessary development to support those colleagues.
6. Enhancing our line management training programmes to enable them to support their team members to develop their skills and progress within L&C.

We are not underestimating the steps we need to take and the length of time it may take to produce tangible dents in 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.