Sadiq Khan today published City Hall’s second ethnicity pay gap report for Greater London Authority employees.
On the whole, the report showed GLA’s ethnicity pay gap, the gap between white and Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) employees’ pay, has fallen since last year, going from 16 to 11.4%.
The biggest pay gap exists in the London Legacy Development Corporation. White employees earn on average £29.05 per hour, and BAME employees £22.09 per hour – a gap of 24%.
The London fire department is the only body with no gap — both white and BAME employees make an average of £16.51 per hour.
Sadiq Khan is calling on the government to get smaller companies to publish their own data, and has launched a Diversity and Inclusion Action Standard.
He said: “The colour of your skin should have no bearing on what you can achieve. We’ve made progress at City Hall and across the group but this data clearly shows there is more work to be done.
“In 2017 I pledged to lead by example and publish data on the ethnicity pay gap in City Hall and across the Greater London Authority group because understanding the scale of this inequality is the first step in tackling it.
“While we should be proud of the progress made, there’s no denying the data presents a mixed picture and there is much more we need to do.”
Alongside this, City Hall published its first action plan to tackle this gap, which proposes increasing interview panel diversity, working with City Hall’s BAME staff network, signing up to Business In The Community’s Race at Work charter, and developing plans for a more inclusive culture at all levels.
However some argue this problem is systemic and much more needs to be done.
Stand Up to Racism South London co-ordinator, Rahul Patel, 59, said: “Institutional racism plays a significant role in exacerbating this pay gap.
“What has happened is that people have assumed that racism is gone away, they’ve got into the mode of operation of thinking that somehow we’re into a kind of post-racism climate, suddenly miraculously somehow things have changed. That’s not the case.”
He added: “As a result of privatisation, as a result of disregarding employment practices or employment legislation, the real differences have now come about and been exacerbated.”
