Want to know how much everyone else is paid? Mind your own business

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Want to know how much others are paid? Mind your own business

Banning questions from employers about a job applicants earnings will make recruitment more difficult and more inefficient

Many of us, with reason, see what we earn as confidential between us and our employer, and disclosure as a major infringement of our privacy

Make employers tell their workforce about what all their colleagues earn, and it becomes much easier to pitch equal pay claims

Andrew Tettenborn

30 October 2026

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Wednesday’s Budget was a depressing fiscal exercise in entrenching stagnation, protection of vested interests, and the discouragement of enterprise (on one count, it left 25% of our small businesses substantially worse off). But if you thought that was all, take a look at some modest proposals for labour law quietly slipped out at much the same time by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), that promise to make life even worse for business.

The law must be changed, the EHRC says, to allow all employees to know what their colleagues earn. Furthermore, two more restrictions should be imported from the EU. All job advertisements should have to expressly state a salary range, and there must be a complete ban on questions to would-be employees about how much they are currently earning.

A business owner is not concerned with equality or fairness, but making his business thrive and recruiting people who overall will help it do so. Demanding that he run his business according to bureaucratic notions of pay transparency, (…) makes his life more difficult and puts his profitability at risk

Why these changes? The answer appears in one word, equality: something, to be fair, that might have been expected from new EHRC head Mary-Ann Stephenson, an ex-Director of the Fawcett Society. Make employers tell their workforce about what all their colleagues earn, and it becomes much easier to pitch equal pay claims. Make pay bands a required part of advertisements, and you narrow the gap between men and women (the former being better than the latter at pitching high when offered a job). And preventing questions about current salary would, it is said, even up offers to those selected and do its part for sex and race equality by removing entrenched disparities.

All this may sound like sweet reasonableness. But look more closely, and there are very good reasons to be sceptical – especially if you are a small to medium employer already struggling in a difficult environment.

For one thing, making salaries public workplace knowledge won’t do much for small office morale. True, some – public sector or pressure group workers perhaps – might like an atmosphere of radical equality and transparency everywhere. But a lot won’t. Many of us, with reason, see what we earn as confidential between us and our employer, and disclosure as a major infringement of our privacy. A law requiring such an invasion in all workplaces is apt to create not so much principled progressivism as sullen resentment and make life yet harder for harassed entrepreneurs. And that’s before you come to the endless bickering over differentials and relative perks that are likely to take attention away from the real business in hand, which is making the company run smoothly and profitably. Do we really want a system of labour law that not only allows but mandates this?

What about salary ranges in advertisements and banning questions about existing earnings? Whatever their effect on equality, these are likely to make recruitment both more difficult and more inefficient for a business already struggling to run efficiently and make ends meet. Imagine a small employer who advertises a job and finds one unexpectedly excellent applicant they are desperate to get before someone else poaches them. Must they be prohibited from offering a salary that would secure that dream worker, because it is outside the terms of the original advert? Again, if employers are not allowed to know what an applicant is earning, this essentially makes the recruitment process inefficient. A high existing salary may well provide a good clue that the would-be recruit is a useful worker who fits in and whom a previous employer was prepared to pay well to keep: a low one, a misfit who will only make difficulties. It cannot be right to prevent employers, whose business requires not simply abstract skills but workers who will come together effectively to apply them, from making use of clues like this. Nor will it help profits to force employers to pay possibly over the odds for a worker they could have had for a good deal less by essentially forcing them to make a stab in the dark when discussing salary.

The difficulty with proposals like these is that they assume that businesses are fundamentally like the bureaucratic organisations they tend to come from: where recruitment can be carried out under neat HR guidelines, where essential and desirable requirements for jobs can be stated in precisely numbered paragraphs, the recruitment exercise itself carried out strictly according to the rules, and everybody asked the same questions to make sure no-one gets an unfair leg up.

Unfortunately that’s not how commerce, especially small business, works. A business owner is not concerned with equality or fairness, but making his business thrive and recruiting people who overall will help it do so. Demanding that he run his business according to bureaucratic notions of pay transparency, or be deprived of the necessary clues that will allow him to appoint a person at the minimum reasonable salary who will fit into the enterprise, makes his life more difficult and puts his profitability at risk. If you are a member of a public body or a quango contemplating making the rules for business, think about this for a moment. And remember whose profits in the end pay the taxes that support your organisation.