Introduction
We often talk about creating places for people to live, work, shop and spend their leisure time – places where life happens. To better understand these places and make sure they’re delivering for everyone, we need to make sure that the people who create them better reflect the diverse communities that use them. We also need to make sure that our people are treated fairly and empowered to achieve their full potential.
One of the ways we monitor how we’re performing internally is through our gender and ethnicity pay gap, which we report on annually. We’ve reported on our gender pay gap for the past seven years – since the gender pay gap regulations came into effect in 2017. This is also our third year of voluntarily reporting on our ethnicity pay gap and our horizontal pay gaps to support our commitment to transparency and accountability in all areas of our Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) work.
It’s worth noting that when we talk about our pay gap, it’s not a reflection of unequal pay. Equal pay is about how much colleagues are paid for doing the same or similar role or work that is considered of equal value. All of our employees are paid based on their role and experience, regardless of their gender or ethnicity. We undertake at least bi-annual external equal pay audits to ensure scrutiny on the issue, with our most recent audit being undertaken in summer 2023.
What’s the data telling us?
This year we’ve seen some improvement in our mean and median gender pay gaps. This was driven by small shifts in the distribution of women across our pay quartiles with increased female representation in the two upper pay quartiles and slight decreases in the two lower pay quartiles. Since the start of the new reporting period, it is heartening to know that the number of women on our Executive Leadership team is at 40%, which will be positively reflected in next year’s pay gap report.
Disappointingly, we’ve seen an increase in our ethnicity pay gap. This has been driven by a high number of ethnic minority hires into our more junior professional and support roles over the past 12 months. Over the same time period, we’ve also had a few of our most senior ethnic minority employees leave us. As a business that is relatively small by headcount, even a small number of changes in representation at our most senior levels can have a significant impact on our pay gap.
Our overall workforce remains broadly representative of the UK population as a whole – 51% female and 18% ethnic minority. Our pay gaps are caused by the shape of our workforce – with more women and ethnic minority employees at our more junior levels and more men and white employees at the more senior levels. We see a similar pattern in occupation type – with more diversity in our group functional roles and less in our property focused roles. It takes time to see change and we have seen that some of our actions that will help in the long term – bringing more ethnic diversity into the industry at entry-level has negatively impacted our pay gaps in the short term. We also have to be honest about the areas where we need to do better – recruiting, retaining and developing ethnic minority talent into leadership positions. Further details of how we plan to do this are on our ‘addressing our pay gaps’ page.
Part of a bigger plan of action
In April 2023, we launched our new diversity & inclusion strategy, created by our people with support from our Executive Leadership Team and Board. The strategy sets out our approach to D&I, including improving the representation of diverse talent at more senior levels and bringing diverse future talent into the industry so that we see more substantial change in the longer term. These actions will help us to recruit and develop female and ethnic minority talent, while our inclusive culture commitments will help us to engage and retain our diverse workforce. Our foundations – being transparent and accountable, and being led by data and evidence of what works, underlie everything that we do on D&I.
Our ‘addressing our pay gaps’ page spotlights the elements of our D&I strategy that are most relevant to addressing our pay gaps.
Welcoming colleagues from U+I
Since our last pay gap report, we’ve welcomed the mixed-use regeneration business U+I into the Landsec Group.
In a change to the way we reported last year, you’ll see we’ve included data for Landsec Group and Land Securities Properties Ltd. At the date we needed to report on our pay gap – 5 April 2023 – we were only legally required to report on Land Securities Properties Ltd which doesn’t include the people employed by U and I Group Ltd.
That said, and in the spirit of all being part of the same group, we have chosen to voluntarily publish pay gap and diversity data for all of our employees who are on one PAYE reference. This includes Land Securities Properties Ltd and U and I Group Ltd and we refer to it as Landsec Group throughout our report.