Chesterfield MP Toby Perkins has thrown his support behind the renewed campaign to close the gender pay gap as Labour revealed figures showing that equal pay for women wouldn’t be achieved in Derbyshire by 2046 under current government policies.

The figures, announced to mark Equal Pay Day, come as women continue to struggle with the hugely unequal impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The gender pay gap increased by 13% between April 2020 and April 2021, when women were more likely to be furloughed, more likely to lose income to home-school, and more likely to work in sectors that are expected to see the slowest economic recovery from the crisis.

In the eight years of the previous Labour Government between 2002 and 2010, the gender pay gap narrowed by over 7%.

The gender pay gap has stalled significantly under Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, with ten million women across the UK now projected to work until retirement without seeing equal pay – up from 8.5 million a year ago.

Toby stated:

“It can’t be fair that it would take another 25 years to close the gap to achieve Equal Pay for women across Derbyshire. I’m pleased that there has been a renewed commitment from the Labour frontbench team to take urgent action to close the gender pay gap by giving women the ability to compare their salaries with men doing the same job in a different firm, and forcing employers to bring forward plans to eradicate pay gaps.”

Labour has pledged urgent action to close the gender pay gap by:

• Modernising equal pay legislation to allow for equal pay comparisons across employers where men and women are carrying out comparable work.
• Enforcing the requirement to report and eliminate pay gaps, with employers required to devise and implement plans to eradicate these inequalities.
• Ensuring outsourced workers are included in employers’ gender pay gap reporting and pay ratio reporting.
• Introducing mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting for firms with more than 250 staff, to mirror gender pay gap reporting rules.

Anneliese Dodds MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, said:

“Women across Derbyshire will find it absurd that the gender pay gap isn’t projected to close in their area until 2046. The Conservative Government should be taking action to close the gender pay gap. Instead it’s standing by while progress has gone into reverse. It’s clear that the Conservatives are failing an entire generation of women”