Cadent believes it is good practice to carry out ethnicity pay reporting in order to be fully transparent, understand potential pay discrepancies and identify any potential root causes, as this then drives meaningful actions to address them.
The gas distribution network employs more than 6,000 UK employees and first published its ethnicity pay gap data in 2022, despite there currently being no legal requirement to collect, analyse or report on ethnicity pay. In its latest report published in March 2024, it had a mean ethnicity pay gap of 1.98%, a median of 5.99%, and an ethnicity non-disclosure rate of 15.04%. It aims to run another campaign in 2025 to encourage staff to disclose their ethnicities.
To calculate its ethnicity pay gap, Cadent follows the same process it currently uses for gender pay reporting. This includes identifying the mean and median ethnicity pay and bonus gaps, the percentage of white staff paid a bonus versus percentage of ethnic minority employees paid a bonus, and ethnic representation in each pay quartile of the workforce.
Keri Handford, people director at Cadent, explains that anti-racism is a priority focus area for the organisation, which wants to create an environment where it understands the roots of racial equality and takes action to ensure policies, processes and working practices create a fair, equitable and inclusive culture for staff from ethnic minority backgrounds.
“It has been important to carry out ethnicity pay gap reporting to understand where any potential pay inequalities might exist and to understand and put in place actions to address this,” she says. “We achieved the Bronze Trailblazer with Race Equality Matters, highlighting how we’ve made an impact with our work on tackling race inequality, with the ambition of accelerating change.”
Cadent ran a ‘Count me in’ campaign and worked closely with its employee community group Embrace, which raises awareness of different faiths and issues that affect staff from an ethnic minority background, to share why it was collecting ethnicity pay data and why it was important to do so. This led to its success in its disclosure rates. Cadent is also a signatory to the Business in the Community Race at Work Charter, and as one of the key commitments to this is to report on ethnicity data, the organisation felt it was important to ensure it had gathered robust data.
Exploring the pay gap data led Cadent to work with Embrace to drive a number of actions, including identifying ambition ranges for ethnic minority representation across the workforce and in senior leadership, adds Handford.
“We’ve also introduced diverse interview panels and piloted anonymised CVs during recruitment, including equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) questions in job interviews for all candidates, applied an EDI lens in succession planning, and piloted accelerated development programmes for ethnicity minority talent,” she says. “We additionally removed barriers to entry for our future talent programmes, and during 2022/23 recruitment increased the representations of ethnic minority staff in our future talent programmes by almost 10%.”
