Gender Pay Report 2021

Introduction

Sunbelt Rentals is the leading equipment rental company in the UK with over 3,800 employees at the date of this statement. 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 with Sunbelt Rentals being a Real Living Wage employer. Nevertheless, we continue to challenge ourselves to seek new ways in which we can encourage and support a more diverse workforce at all levels of our business. In support of that goal, we have diversity and inclusion forums in place across our business, and have established mental, physical and financial wellbeing programmes for our employees. In addition, enhanced maternity and paternity policies seek to support our workforce.

During the course of the year, we have completed a comprehensive pay and grade benchmarking exercise, which resulted in a greater proportion of remuneration for the workforce comprising fixed rather than variable remuneration. This has aided us in attracting a more diverse workforce within our recruitment processes.

In addition, as part of our strategic ambitions for the business, we have made targeted investments over the last year in our workforce within our support office functions, including investments in senior professional roles, together with increasing the capacity of our centralised hire desks and sales roles. These roles are attractive to a more diverse population as they provide a more flexible working environment.

Nevertheless, our workforce overall 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 and we believe that women will make up a greater proportion of our workforce over time, a significant proportion of our employees are fitter engineers, HGV drivers and traffic management operatives, and these roles are typically held by men. As a result, only 15% of work workforce is female (2020: 14%).

We recognise that encouraging diversity across all areas of our business needs to be an area of ongoing focus. In relation to gender diversity, our sector-leading apprenticeship scheme has 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. While this will take a number of years to make an impact, it is supported by a broader recruitment approach to encourage a more diverse mix of candidates and which has led to more senior female appointments over the year.

Our gender pay report for 2021 is set out below. 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 reflects 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, Chief Executive, March 2022

Gender Pay Reporting

In line with government requirements, we set out below our gender pay statistics as at 5 April 2021.  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

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 bottom quartile reflecting the fact that the nature of roles in the lower quartile, which include roles such as that of traffic management operative, have attracted fewer women historically. Nevertheless, we made progress within the top and lower middle quartiles over the past year reflecting investments made in professional roles within our support office functions and in our centralised hire desks and sales roles, as commented upon above.

Gender Pay Gap

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

For the current reporting period, the median pay for women is 0.4% higher than that for men whilst their mean pay is 0.9% lower than that for men.  These figures demonstrate that Sunbelt Rentals does not have a significant gender pay gap and 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

The proportion of all employees receiving a bonus increased compared with the prior year reflecting company-wide performance and the commitment of our workforce throughout the challenging COVID-19 pandemic period, with recognition bonuses paid to our skilled trade workforce.  The percentage of men and women receiving bonus payments was similar.   

Bonus gender pay gap

For the current period, the median bonus payment was slightly higher for women than men. During the year, we paid out a large number of bonus payments across the whole business population. The median payment for women was higher as the majority of female employees were included in the annual company bonus scheme, whereas a significant proportion of male employees were included in the skilled trade incentive scheme under which they received appreciation bonuses to thank our people for their continued efforts. This reduced the median male bonus payment during the year with a higher proportion of lower quartile male employees receiving a bonus payment.

The mean bonus payment was however lower for women than for men. At a senior level, employees benefit from both annual bonus arrangements and longer-term incentive arrangements which are subject to vesting conditions over a three-year period. The lower level of women in senior positions means that these longer-term inventive arrangements have been skewed towards men within the workforce and therefore resulted in a lower mean bonus payable to women.