Evening Standard comment: Equal rights and the City

In the City, in financial services, the pay gap is nearly 42 per cent. Now the Government is to tackle the issue through its new Equality Bill and is also sending in a new Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate differing pay rates in the City. Companies will no longer be allowed to impose gagging orders to ban employees from disclosing their salaries. The Bill will also oblige companies with public sector contracts to disclose the average rates of pay for men and women. It will allow employers to use positive discrimination to bolster the numbers of women and ethnic minority staff.

These are complex issues. It may be, for instance, that many women with families simply do not want the long hours that go with senior positions in most City firms. Yet it will be salutary to see in bald terms quite how large the gender pay gap is. It may be that the sheer size of the differences between men's and women's remuneration will cause managers to rethink pay structures in firms undertaking public contracts. But the fact that the disclosure is simply about average male and female pay rather than divided into bands based on seniority means that the disclosure figures will be less telling than they might be. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission is unlikely to oblige City firms to pay particular individuals more but the requirement to justify differences in rates of pay may cause firms to rethink their ways. Any rational employer will pay individuals on merit, because in the City, talent is mobile. But sometimes, even now, men are simply more aggressive in seeking better pay.

An even more important part of the Equalities Bill is its measures to outlaw discrimination in the provision of goods and services on the basis of age. It is a disgrace that even healthy old people should find it so hard to obtain insurance and that premiums should rise so dramatically after a particular age. It is also unacceptable for the NHS to deny older people the medical treatment they need simply because they are old. Age discrimination may be invisible but it is corrosive of old people's dignity and well-being - it has to go.