Life at PCH

Gender pay gap reporting is about the difference between the average pay of men and women working at PCH. It isn’t the same as equal pay; which is a legal obligation to ensure that men and women doing the same or similar jobs are paid the same.

Note: In the tables and graphs below, the information provided is at the 5 April 2024.

Where are we now?

Our gender pay gap has increased this year and this report provides details on where this increase has taken place and why this may have occurred. We have used this information to highlight actions we will take to support us to reduce our gap as close to 0% as possible in the future.

The distribution of women and men in our workforce

Across our organisation the workforce is made up of

Men: 55%
Women: 45%

Overall, the distribution of women and men we employ varies across the types and seniority of roles. When we divide our employee team into four quarters (or ‘quartiles’) according to how much they earn, the proportion of men and women within each quartile is shown in the graphic/table below.

In terms of the gender distribution at PCH 39.9% of the upper salary quartile are woman occupying key senior management positions across the organisation. This has slightly increased from 2023 by 1.2%.
The number of females employed in upper middle quartile salary roles have decreased by 4.9% to 31.6%. This quartile includes roles that are historically filled by men in the technical and building related occupations.
The change in the upper middle and lower middle quartiles has also been affected by a number of roles predominately filled by females moving from one quartile to the other. This has helped the change in the number of females coming under quartile 2 increase by 5.8% to 67.7%. Roles in the lower middle quartile include administrative posts.
We continue to run counter to national trends by having a low female intake into the lower quartile roles, however, the number of females in this quartile has increased by 2%.

The gender pay gap is the difference between the average hourly earnings for men in an organisation and the average hourly earnings for women. For example, a 10% gender pay gap shows that women earn 10% less per hour, on average, than men. A negative -10% gender pay gap shows that women earn 10% more, on average than men. Earnings include payments such as on call payments and fire warden allowances.

The calculation requires us to deduct from pay any amount that is paid into a salary sacrifice scheme. This could include cycle to work, holiday trading and pensions. At PCH, many of our colleagues pay their pension contributions through salary sacrifice. This therefore has an impact on our pay figures. A man and a woman could have the same level of pay, but if one pays their pension through salary sacrifice and the other does not, then their pay for the purposes of this report will show as being different. We also allow employees to make different levels of pension contributions. Therefore a man and a woman could have the same level of pay, but pay a different level of pension contribution through salary sacrifice, then their pay for the purposes of this report will be different.

Example:

A Male and Female on same basic salary, have a 10.9% pay gap or £2.50 per hour difference in gender pay. As the male is in a non-salary sacrifice pension scheme and the female is.

The average is calculated as both mean and median.

Mean earnings are calculated by adding up all hourly earnings and dividing them by the number of employees.

Median earnings come from ranking all earnings from lowest to highest and identifying the employee in the middle of the list.

The mean (simple average) is preferred to the median as it gives a better measure of pay across the organisation.

The mean gender pay gap at PCH has increased in 2024 from 2.7% to 3.9%, an increase of 1.2%

Our median gender pay gap has also increased from 4.1% to 8.1% a change of 4%.

Gender pay gap result without salary sacrifice deductions

If we don’t include salary sacrifice deductions from employees hourly rate our gender pay gap is:

Mean: 3.4%
Median: 6.8%

If salary sacrifice is not deducted from the hourly rate calculation, the pay gaps are lower between males and females. There is a 0.5% difference in the Mean Gender Pay Gap and a 1.6% difference in the Median Pay Gap.

How we make additional payments

In this reporting period, bonus payments were given to employees under our refer a friend scheme whereby employees receive a payment on successful employment of someone they know.

These payments were awarded to 2% of male employees and 1.1% of female employees, recognised as a bonus payment under the gender pay gap, giving a bonus pay gap of 0.9%.

What is Ethnicity Pay Reporting?

This is a voluntary report that is calculated in the same way as the gender pay gap, it calculates the difference between the average pay of employees who are White British and those who have disclosed that they are from ‘Other Ethnic Groups’. The calculation requires us to deduct from pay any amount that is paid into a salary sacrifice scheme. This could include cycle to work, holiday trading and pensions. So where employees are on the same salary, i.e. £25,000 if one has voluntary salary sacrifice deductions, their hourly rate for the purposes of this report will be different.

Reporting our ethnicity is slightly more challenging as 96.2% of our employees have chosen to disclose their ethnicity, whereas our data return for gender is 100% as it’s not reliant on voluntary disclosure. This means that we have an incomplete picture of our workforce, which limits the accuracy of our reporting. To improve this, we are running campaigns to encourage employees to share their personal information.

The proportion of employees who have voluntarily disclosed their ethnicity – 96.2%

Breakdown of these colleagues ethnicity:

White British – 95.56%
Other Ethnic Group – 4.44%

Due to the low numbers of other ethnic groups that aren’t white British, we have grouped these to ensure that individuals cannot be identified.

Using Census data from 2021, the ethnicity of our workforce matches that of the tenants that we support.

Proportion of ethnic minority and non-ethnic minority colleagues in each pay quartile

Ethnicity pay gap

Our mean ethnicity pay gap is 15.78%

Our median ethnicity pay gap is 18.59%

This means that on average, White British employees are paid 15.78% more than their ethnic minority counterparts.

The quartile table shows that the distribution of ethnic minority employees gets smaller, as salary increases and helps to demonstrate why we have a large gap.

Bonus payments

In the reporting period, 1.7% of employees received a bonus payment. These payments were made in relation to the organisations ‘Refer a Friend’ scheme. 100% of these payments were made to White British employees.

We continue to work closely with schools and colleges in the local community by offering work experience placements, mock interviews and attending apprenticeship open days. We have recently been asked by the Devon, Plymouth and Torbay Careers Hub to join their employers group to influence wider conversations around careers education and skills required for the workplace with schools, which helps to encourage non-biased conversations around certain careers, i.e. anyone can be an apprentice electrician if they wish to and have the required level of English and Maths.

We have introduced a succession planning scheme, to support employees apply for promotion opportunities within the organisation with the aim of filling 50% of vacancies internally. Our succession scheme has an equal number of males and females attending to support this.

We continue to ensure that our recruitment adverts are inclusive and are consistent with the organisations branding across all digital platforms.

We are implementing a workforce planning process to support the needs of the business and reduce skills gaps, encouraging and supporting internal development of existing employees where applicable.

We are encouraging employees to provide their Ethnicity and other characteristics so we are aware of the make-up our workforce and can provide employees with appropriate support when and where required.

PCH has signed up to the National Housing Federations EDI scheme to encourage Housing Associations to reflect the communities that they support.

As a Disability Confident Leader, we continue to work closely with the Job Centre to support the local community in applying for job opportunities at PCH.

We will continue, where appropriate, to publish our vacancies with the Disability Boards through SEETEC and also specialist publications which focus on ethnic minorities, for example Diversity Inclusion jobs board.