UK Equality Watchdog Calls for Legal Right to See Colleagues' Pay

UK employees should get a legal right to find out what their colleagues earn, and employers should be banned from asking job applicants about their current salary, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has proposed.

The EHRC, Britain's equality watchdog, wants lawmakers to make it compulsory for employers to answer staff questionnaires about colleagues' pay within a specific timeframe. Right now, employers face no such obligation — a request for salary information about coworkers can simply be ignored.

The disclosure the EHRC has in mind is detailed. Employers would have to provide:

• colleagues' basic pay and hours worked
• how employees' pay compares with each other
• information on bonuses, overtime, shift premiums and performance-related pay

The goal, the Commission argues, is to cut pay discrimination — especially against women.

What does this change for hiring?

The second half of the proposal targets the salary-history question. Under current UK rules, employers can ask what you earn in your present role, though applicants are under no obligation to answer. The EHRC wants that question removed from the hiring process altogether.

John Kirkpatrick, the EHRC chief executive, told the BBC that employers should not be able to ask about salary history when setting pay.

"When they do, what tends to happen is that can embed a history of disadvantage or discrimination in future salaries," he said.

Kirkpatrick drew a practical line: employers should still be free to offer a competitive salary, but that offer should not "create a pattern that discriminates."

The Fawcett Society, which campaigns for women and gender equality, has made the same argument before. Asking about past pay, the society said, risks maintaining historic unfair differences in pay rooted in gender, race and disability inequality.

Why salary history anchors pay downward

The mechanics here matter for anyone who negotiates pay. If a new offer is pegged to your old salary rather than to the value of the role, an early underpayment — or a stretch of discrimination earlier in your career — gets priced into every job you take afterwards.

The Fawcett Society's critique goes further. Rather than offering a salary based on skills, experience and performance, salary-history questions mean employers end up rewarding an individual's perceived worth and negotiating skills instead. In practice, the best negotiator gets the biggest paycheck, not necessarily the best performer.

For employers, the proposals would flip the current default. Instead of pay opacity being the safe legal position, transparency would be — with mandated response times and a defined set of pay data that must be handed over on request.

The EHRC has previously argued that women would also benefit from employers publishing salary details in job adverts, extending transparency from current staff to the hiring market itself.

Neither proposal is law yet. Both now sit with lawmakers, and if they pass, UK employers will need pay-data systems that can answer colleague-level queries on deadline — while HR teams strip the salary-history question from every interview script.