Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to combat workplace discrimination could be unlawful, claims leading law firm

Leader’s proposal to force companies to publish ‘equality pay audits’ could ‘breach human rights’

Jeremy Corbyn at the launch of his campaign to remain as Labour leader (AP)

Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to combat discrimination in the workplace by forcing companies to publish details of their employees’ pay and “equality characteristics” could be unlawful, a leading law firm has claimed.

The policy, which was announced on Thursday at a speech in London as Mr Corbyn launched his campaign to remain Labour leader, will require all employers with more than 21 staff to publish “equality pay audits”.

Mr Corbyn said the audits would detail “pay, grade and hours of every job” alongside “data on recognised equality characteristics”.

“It is not only women who face workplace discrimination but disabled workers, the youngest and oldest worker, black and ethnic minority workers. Young workers are institutionally discriminated against, not entitled to the full minimum wage, not entitled to equal rates of housing benefit and so many are now saddled with huge student debts,” he added.

But Sarah Henchoz, a partner at Allen & Overy law firm, responding to the announcement said: “Taken at face value, Jeremy Corbyn’s proposals would be unlawful.”

“The principle is an extension of the current Government’s gender pay gap reporting requirements but going into such a granular level of detail when it comes to employee pay and equality characteristics would likely mean that employees would be identifiable. This would be a breach of human rights and data protection law and would expose companies to legal challenge and probably also investigations by the ICO and Human Rights Commission,” she added.

“Furthermore, it would be wise to question the quality and accuracy of the data that employers will be able to collect. Employees are not required to provide information on their equality characteristics – sexuality, ethnicity, disability etc. – to their employer so it may be the case that any data the employer has is not wholly accurate or even representative of its workforce. To require employees to provide this information would mean a change to the law and such a change is unlikely to be supported given these are sensitive matters and would require a substantial intrusion into an employee’s privacy.”

A spokesperson for Mr Corbyn, however, dismissed the claim. “The information requested by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission would not be specific enough to identify individuals and would therefore not be in breach of the Data Protection Act,” they added.

Ian de Freitas, a partner at Berwin Leighton Paisner with expertise in privacy law, told The Independent that “you need to see a lot more meat on the bones” of Mr Corbyn’s proposal before a judgement on its legality can be reached. He said: “My initial reaction was to think about the privacy side of it – most people are pretty sensitive about what they get paid”.

But, he added, it was not unlawful from a data protection or privacy prospective if there is a justifiable reason for publishing the data. “If the Labour Party or Jeremy Corbyn puts forward a position which says well it has a benefit to society that outweighs the privacy concerns – from a privacy and data protection perspective that might be OK,” he said.

“It’s not prima facie unlawful… you really need to see the details of the proposal”.