Public and Commercial Services Union

DfT is meant to comply with equality duties arising from 2010 Equality Act. This requires, amongst other things, the department to have due regard in carrying out its functions of the need to eliminate sex discrimination and to comply with equal pay legislation.

The need to have due regard and to eliminate sex discrimination is nothing new. Under the previous gender duty, which was subsumed into the general equality duty as result of the 2010 Act, DfT was meant to do the same.

DfT didn’t comply with this duty and, putting our money where our mouth was we launched ground breaking equal cases on behalf of women EOs in DVLA and we also started a judicial review arguing that the gender duty was not being complied with.

The Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC – now subsumed into the EHRC) recommend in their Code of Practice on Equal Pay that public authorities (DfT being one) carry out a cross authority equal pay audit.

The union asked for such a department wide audit. This request was refused twice (once by a minister and once by a permanent secretary) even though in a letter to DfT the EOC backed our call.

Instead DfT carried out audits within each agency and separately DfT (C). By doing this the duty placed on the department as a whole was delegated to its sub parts. This negated the gender duty.

You can see below the reason why DfT refused. There was, and still is, a sharp gender/pay segregation within the department; segregation that DfT wants to defend.

The below table shows how sharp this gender effect was (the gender balance today remains virtually the same as set out in the table):

Just over 56% of all women in the Department work in DVLA.

In six of the BUs the majority of staff are in traditionally male occupations.

Agency          Majority Occupations

DfT(C)             Policy makers
DSA                Driving Examiners
HA                  Road, Bridge Engineers
MCA               Coastguards, Marine Surveyors
VCA                Technical Staff
VOSA              Mechanics, Traffic/Vehicle Examiners
 

On average staff in DVLA (i.e. women) have lower pay than the rest of the department. We say that the major cause of this lower pay is sex discrimination.

As said above we legally challenged DfT’s refusal to comply with the gender duty in two ways. Firstly we asked for a judicial review of DfT’s refusal to carry out a cross DfT review of pay. Secondly we took equal pay cases on behalf of women EOs in DVLA against male Driving Examiners and Senior Driving Examiners in DSA.

It was decided to suspend the judicial review pending the outcome of the equal pay cases. Of course given that the gender duty has now been superseded by the equality duties the judicial review fell by the way side.

That leaves the equal pay challenge.

You can earn more of the equal pay campaign here.