Gender Pay Report 2020

Sunbelt Rentals is the leading plant, tool and specialist equipment rental company in the UK with over 3,500 employees. We offer a broad range of equipment for a wide range of applications and a diverse customer base through our nationwide store network.

Having an engaged and diverse workforce, where our people feel motivated and valued to fulfil their potential and support our wide customer base, is critical to the continued success of our business. To that end, we aim to be the leading employer in our industry and continue to challenge ourselves to seek new ways in which we can encourage and reward a more diverse workforce.

Sunbelt Rentals is a Real Living Wage employer and looks to attract a broad and diverse mix of employees to all levels of our business. In support of that goal, we have established diversity and inclusion forums across our business, initiated mental and physical wellbeing programmes for our employees, and developed enhanced maternity and paternity policies.

Nevertheless, our workforce reflects the nature of our business, the industry we operate in, and the markets we serve. As such, while some areas of our business attract more women, a significant proportion of our employees are fitter engineers, HGV drivers and traffic management operatives, and these roles are typically held by men. As such, only 14% of work workforce is female (2019: 13%).

We recognise that we need to continue to build on the progress we have made to encourage diversity across all areas of our business and we continue to seek to recruit and promote more women to positions across our business. Our sector-leading apprenticeship scheme, which is growing year-on-year, is supported by 13 Apprentice Ambassadors working with local schools and colleges and we have seen success in increasing the number of women within both our engineering and customer service apprenticeships. Over time, we believe that this will broaden the representation of women within our workforce at all levels as they progress through the company. This will however take a number of years to make an impact.

Below we set out our gender pay report for 2020. While we continue to make progress on encouraging diversity across our workforce, the shifts in our reported data reflect the fact that relatively small changes in our workforce profile can have a significant impact on our gender pay data given the current proportion of women to men. Our approach is to reward our workforce by reference to individual performance, experience and skill set, and as such we are confident that any pay or bonus gap is reflective of the structure of our workforce. Nonetheless, we ensure that we understand the underlying trends in detail so that we can continue to develop and are confident that over time, our initiatives will increase the proportion of women in our workforce at all levels.

Andy Wright - CEO Sunbelt Rentals UK

Gender pay reporting

In line with government requirements, we set out below our gender pay statistics as at 5 April 2020. The data required to be reported is:

the distribution of men and women across the four pay quartiles, based on their hourly rate of pay;
the difference in the mean and median hourly rate of pay between men and women;
the proportion of men and women who receive a bonus; and
the difference in the mean and median bonus pay between men and women.

The government has set out the basis upon which these statistics should be calculated.

Pay quartiles

	Top quartile		Upper middle quartile		Lower middle quartile		Lower quartile
	Men	Women	Men	Women	Men	Women	Men	Women
2020	86.8%	13.2%	85.0%	15.0%	83.6%	16.4%	87.8%	12.2%
2019	86.4%	13.6%	86.7%	13.3%	83.4%	16.6%	88.5%	11.5%

The graphic illustrates the gender distribution at Sunbelt Rentals across each of the four pay quartiles and is broadly consistent with the proportion of women in our business. However we do have proportionately fewer women in the top and bottom quartiles reflecting the fact that the majority of senior management are men, and that roles in the lower quartile have attracted fewer women historically.

Gender pay gap

The gender pay gap is the difference between the mean and median hourly rate of pay for men and women.

	Median	Mean
Women’s hourly pay is	1.3% lower	5.0% lower
2019 comparison	1.3% higher	4.6% lower

For the current reporting period, the median pay for women is 1.3% lower than that for men whilst their mean pay is 5.0% lower than that for men. These figures demonstrate that Sunbelt Rentals does not have a significant gender pay gap but is reflective of the higher proportion of women in the middle pay quartiles based on their roles.

Compared with the prior year, our mean gender pay gap has widened slightly as a result of a small number of male senior appointments made, where experienced individuals from the industry have been recruited into the business in order to support the continued evolution of the business. In contrast, the median gender pay gap has remained unchanged. However, as commented above, any movement in our mean or median figures reflect relatively small shifts in the make-up of our workforce.

The gender pay gap should not be confused with Equal Pay, which is a legal requirement and ensures that individuals carrying our similar duties are paid fairly compared to one another. We are committed to ensuring equal pay and our reward policies are designed to ensure this.

Bonus Pay

In the year under review, all employees were eligible to participate in some form of incentive arrangement linked to either company or individual performance.

Proportion receiving a bonus

	Women	Men
Proportion receiving a bonus	37.0%	42.3%
2019 comparison	43.1%	51.3%

The proportion of all employees receiving a bonus decreased compared with the prior year reflecting company-wide performance in light of challenging market conditions.

Bonus gender pay gap

	Median	Mean
Women’s bonus pay is	95.8% higher	24.7% lower
2019 comparison	Equal	28.1% lower

For the current period, the median bonus payment was significantly higher for women than men. During the year, we launched new incentive schemes which were aimed towards retaining longer serving employees and rewarding our skilled labour workforce. This reduced the median male bonus payment during the year as these were predominately made to male employees.

The mean bonus payment was however lower for women than for men. This is influenced heavily by the lower proportion of women in senior positions within the company and therefore the greater number of men who benefitted from the vesting of long-term incentive arrangements.

Gender Pay Report 2019

Read our Gender Pay Report from 2019 here.

Gender Pay Report