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Anglian Water has set out its ambition to double the ethnic diversity make-up of its senior team to 8% by 2025.
The company has published its first ethnicity pay gap report, which showed a median ethnicity pay gap of 4.6% last year.
Setting out its plans for this year, the company said it intends to increase the number of senior positions held by employees from ethnically diverse communities by one percentage point to 4%.
It has also set an ambition to attract more new hires from diverse backgrounds to ensure that by 2025, 20% of new hires are diverse. For 2022, 9% of new hires were from ethnically diverse backgrounds.
The ethnicity split of the company overall highlighted 95.2% of employees in 2022 were white, and 4.8% were from other ethnic backgrounds.
Ethnicity reporting is not a requirement for any company but can be volunteered as companies push to be more transparent.
Severn Trent also calculated ethnicity pay gaps alongside its gender pay reporting. It showed the median hourly pay rate for white employees last year was 4.1% higher than for ethnic-minority staff. For Severn Trent, 10% of staff declared themselves as an ethnic minority.
Yorkshire began reporting its own pay gap data in 2019, when the median difference between white employees and minority employees was 9.7% and subsequently tightened to 2.1%.
Anglian said it began proactively asking staff to voluntarily report their ethnicity from 2020. This has grown from 35% of employees to 70% of people submitting their data.
“Our workforce is currently predominated by white ethnicities,” said Susannah Clements group director of people and change. “This composition has contributed to an ethnicity pay gap. Improving our ethnicity pay gap will take time and effort, but we are dedicated to making progress in this area in order to have a more equitable and inclusive workforce.”
Clements said the diversity targets, together with targeted recruitment, employee retention and better community engagement will help grow an inclusive and equitable workplace.
Anglian said its ethnicity pay gap shows the difference in the average pay between staff from ethnically diverse communities (EDC) in its workforce, compared to white employees.
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