'U turn' saves pay protections

Equal pay protections for men and women scrapped under the Retained EU Law Act are to be saved by new legislation described by the Labour Party as a government U-turn.

The act, which received royal assent in June, revoked longstanding European Union laws that safeguarded the principle of equal pay for equal work provided the job’s terms and conditions came from a “single source”. But the government has now pledged to preserve the protections in secondary legislation to be revealed by the end of the year.

A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office’s Equality Hub said: “There will be absolutely no reduction in equal pay protections. New secondary legislation will be laid in Parliament long before the end of the year.”

Labour had already committed to restore the measures should it come to power and its shadow women and equalities secretary, Anneliese Dodds, mocked the government backdown.

“Women will wonder if the party that put these rights at risk can really be trusted to protect them,” she said in a post on X (formerly Twitter), adding that Labour would go further by creating an enforcement unit in the Equality and Human Rights Commission to track equal pay cases and reduce unfair practices by employers.