Consultants advise firms to sack workers to hide gender pay gaps

COMPANIES ARE allegedly using loopholes in the law to report a more favourable picture of their gender pay gap, according to a report.

Channel 4’s Dispatches said specialist consultants had been advising companies – who are legally obliged to publish their gender pay disparity data by next month – on how to avoid reporting their gap in full.

The options include splitting a company in two, so that the highest male earners’ salaries are reported separately, withholding details of directors’ pay if they are also classed as owners of a company.

Some companies have even made staff redundant.

Employers of more than 250 people are legally required to publish data on pay for male and female staff by April 4.

The consultants were filmed by undercover

Dispatches reporters, who posed as bosses from a fictitious cleaning company with 264 employees.

One adviser told the programme’s fake bosses: “There’s various scurrilous, clever legal ruses that we can suggest to you... I mean there’s even potentially options of do you set up a subsidiary, a parent company, and stick all your highly paid bosses in that... So that they get out of the picture. “So say you have 251 employees we might suggest that you might want to make a couple redundant... On April 3 if you could find a couple to make redundant ... there’s obviously unfair dismissal risk there ’cos it might not be redundancy, you might be prepared to take it if you had the odd two to let go.” Another adviser told the undercover reporters there may be little or no consequences for organisations that do not report their figures.