Paul Howarth Chief Executive Officer
Clare Barlow Chief HR Officer
Introduction
Our Strategic Plan demonstrates strong commitment to our purpose ‘Nuclear Science to Benefit Society’ and the essential role of promoting Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (ED&I).
We delivered our strategic vision for technical excellence and social value, and achieved the National Equality Standard (NES) Accreditation at our first attempt in March 2021.
This year’s Gender Pay Gap report covers the first year of our work addressing the NES’s recommendations and focuses on our progress towards gender parity as this is the purpose of assessing these pay gaps.
We accepted and are acting on the recommendations from NES. These 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 our supplier relations.
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 explored any trends in our data. We build on this approach in our latest report, again primarily highlighting our progress in analysing our gender-related data. We supplement this with several case studies, one on improvements we have introduced in the same period to our career support, another outlining a successful pilot to promote social mobility and equality of opportunity through outreach and, our final featured case study demonstrates how we are growing the inclusivity of NNL for all.
NNL believes in playing its part in building a thriving and diverse nuclear sector, one capable of sustaining the extraordinary predicted growth in the sector needed to underpin net zero, the decommissioning agenda and our focus area aspirations.
As the UK’s national lab for fission, we take our responsibility to grow and secure skills for the future seriously. We do this through a programme of NNL activities and collaboration with other organisations. We extend this approach to our ED&I agenda, understanding the importance of working with other organisations both operationally and strategically to drive tangible sector-wide change through:
- The Nuclear Skills Strategy Group (NSSG) and our contribution to its ED&I focus area
- Sharing, developing, and championing best practice through ED&I Alliance Nuclear, a pan-nuclear information sharing forum for ED&I which we set up with Nuvia in late 2021
- Developing the concept for Racial Equality in Nuclear (REiN) with support from the NNL Board - this is a pan-nuclear collaboration championed by Emin Veron, who was a runner up at the NSAN Awards in March 2022 for his work in this space
- Continuing our support to Women in Nuclear and supporting other nuclear ED&I intiatives when the opportunity arises
Over the period covered by this report, the COVID-19 pandemic became less dominant as an organisational priority, but we retained the agility it enabled. We have upgraded our offices to better accommodate hybrid working with lots of collaboration and flexible working spaces.
Finally, 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