Equality Bill

The hon. Lady makes an important point, which is akin to the point about ghettoisation. There might be different functions in a company or even entire sectors in which women have traditionally found it easier to get work. I would suggest that the reason for that will at least partly be the convenient hours that women can get in those sectors and the fact that they might fit more directly with the breakdown of time between child care and family responsibilities and work. However, that does not necessarily make what happens right. That is why I talked earlier about the importance of adequate child care, in order to give women more choices than they have had in the past, although publishing pay reporting figures is not necessarily the answer to that problem. Sorting out child care would be a far faster and, I would suggest, a far more robust response to the problem. Gender pay reporting would none the less be worth doing if it were a trifle—something that would be cheap to do—and if we could thereby address the full-time gender pay gap of between 1 and 5 per cent., wiping it out or at least providing the information that would allow it to be wiped out. If gender pay reporting were that cheap, my party would be saying, "Well, this is a sensible and acceptable price to pay." However, the costs are causing me and many others grave concern. In the Government's defence, the calculation has risen—I had a bit of a go at the Government about the issue in Committee. The House will be pleased to hear that the calculation has risen—it has nearly doubled, in fact. The Government say that the one-off implementation costs for large companies—those with more than 250 employees, such as Tesco, Shell or O2—have gone up from an estimated £92 per firm to £215.