The Equality and Human Rights Commission has told the UK government that workers should have a legal right to request — and receive — detailed pay information about colleagues doing similar work. The recommendation responds to a government consultation on overhauling equal pay laws, and it goes further than the proposal on the table. The EHRC wants mandatory employer compliance within a specified timeframe, not optional goodwill. The specifics matter. Staff would be able to request a colleague's annual salary, hours worked, bonuses, overtime, job description, internal evaluation scores, salary benchmarks, job grades, and a ranking of team members by basic pay. That is not a vague transparency gesture — it is a forensic toolkit designed to surface precisely the kind of granular pay architecture that currently stays locked inside HR systems. The watchdog also wants a ban on employers asking job applicants about their current salary. This targets a well-documented ratchet: when hiring decisions anchor to existing pay, historical discrimination compounds across every job change. Women who were underpaid at 25 carry that discount into every subsequent negotiation. Banning salary history questions breaks the transmission mechanism. The original right to submit pay questionnaires existed before 2014, when it was abolished under the Coalition government's deregulation agenda. The EHRC is explicit about why reinstatement alone is insufficient — without mandatory response timelines, employers can delay, obfuscate, or simply ignore requests. The watchdog wants teeth, not ceremony. The gender pay gap remains stubborn. ONS data from April this year shows women in full-time work earn 6.8% less than men at the median. In finance, the picture is worse: mean and median gaps of 24% and 22% respectively — roughly double the national average for UK companies. These are not marginal discrepancies. They compound across careers and into pensions. The EHRC frames transparency as cheaper than litigation. Early resolution of pay disputes, the watchdog argues, saves employers the cost and reputational damage of employment tribunals. This is a pragmatic pitch to business: sunlight is cheaper than lawyers. Whether UK employers — particularly in finance — agree is another question entirely. The proposal's real significance is structural. Pay secrecy is not a neutral norm; it is an information asymmetry that systematically benefits whoever sets pay. Removing it does not guarantee equal outcomes, but it removes the precondition for silent discrimination. The question now is whether ministers adopt the mandatory version the EHRC is pushing, or water it down into something optional that employers can safely ignore.
