Introduction

Since March 2020, every organisation has been impacted by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The enforced change to working patterns and the creativity and innovation required to make this work has been challenging but has also created opportunities to address long-established cultural impediments to change. Focusing on ensuring the wellbeing of our staff, respecting and accommodating their individual life circumstances during the lockdowns and beyond has enabled us to steer a successful path through the pandemic. This supportive approach to our people is now baked into NNL’s Strategic Plan 2021: This is NNL. In considering NNL’s commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion (ED&I) over the past year, we are pleased that, despite the pandemic, we have been able to build on the strong foundations laid down last year and our commitment has continued to grow. Delivering our purpose of “Nuclear Science to Benefit Society” will only be achieved by committing to support our people and wider society.

Over the last few years, our gender pay gap reports have shared our data on gender parity, outlined the activities we have been undertaking to improve our business and put the spotlight on some of the people in our business who have been championing the cause of ED&I. This year our report focuses on the trends in our data and highlights some of the systemic ED&I-focused improvements we have made to our business in keeping with our ED&I Strategy, published in early 2020.

We are proud to be awarded the National Equality Standard for inclusiveness in business

After an initial period of growing our ED&I programme and understanding our ED&I maturity, we felt it was time to benchmark ourselves externally. We chose the National Equality Standard (NES) for its broad and comprehensive view of equality, diversity and inclusion and its ability to do a deep and thorough review of our organisation. The accreditation process covers 35 competency areas split into seven pillars, which in turn cover key aspects of doing business. At the back end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, NES reviewed documentation, interviewed people from all areas and levels in the business and surveyed our people to get a clear picture of our organisation.

After the rigorous review, we were very pleased to be awarded the NES accreditation in March 2021 at our first attempt. This is a considerable success for NNL and reinforces our approach to this vital area over recent years (including during the pandemic). The comprehensive report that NES provided gives us further confidence in our strategic approach as the recommendations align with our published ED&I strategy. We accept and intend to act upon the recommendations which were to expand our ED&I focus beyond gender; support leaders and managers to drive ED&I; improve data capture and analysis to inform initiatives; drive a more structured approach to career progression; attract and recruit diverse talent and consider ED&I in supplier relations.

Although we are delighted with the result of the NES accreditation, we recognise we still have a long way to go, not least with regards to our gender pay gaps, the subject of this report.

As part of the first year of our strategy, we have embedded ED&I into our objectives and key results (OKRs) and are investing in a career pathways tool to enable us and our people to better articulate and explore the opportunities we have to offer. We have put in place the mechanisms to enable us in the coming years to capture and scrutinise our ED&I data beyond gender in a way that is anonymised but will allow us to investigate career processes with an ED&I lens. We are also improving data capture in our recruitment pipeline.

As this is our fifth consecutive year of gender pay gap reporting, we have found it informative to present the data in this report in the context of previous years’ data. This allows us to look more holistically at how we are evolving gender parity with time. We are pleased to see that a number of our measures are improving, albeit some more slowly than we would like. There is, for example, a distinct upward trend in the percentage of women in our organisation. Although it remains challenging to recruit large numbers of women especially with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) backgrounds into the nuclear sector, we continue to do our part.

We are part of the wider nuclear sector and we understand the importance of working with other organisations both operationally and strategically. We continue to develop this through our support to the Nuclear Skills Strategy Group (NSSG) and proactive contribution to its ED&I focus area. We are keen to share, develop, and champion best practice. We want to ensure that we are doing all we can, not only to achieve gender parity in NNL, but to make the nuclear sector a diverse and vibrant sector that reflects our society. Advocating for diversity and inclusivity across the sector will help us in achieving a diverse workforce within NNL in every respect and at every level of our organisation.

Over the coming years it is hoped and expected that the pandemic will become less dominant as an organisational priority. But the lessons we have learnt from it, the innovations we have developed and the cultural and behavioural changes that have arisen will, we believe, only serve to improve our approach to ED&I and our ability as an organisation to adapt further, innovate and deliver on our commitment in this vital area.

We can confirm that the data presented in this report has been calculated according to the requirements of The Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information Regulations 2017) and is accurate and correct to the best of our knowledge and ability.

Paul Howarth and Clare Barlow