Gender Pay Gap Report 2020

In April 2017, the UK Government introduced new Gender Pay Gap regulations, requiring companies to report their gender pay gap for all legal entities in Great Britain with more than 250 employees.

The gender pay gap shows the difference in average pay between women and men. It does not measure equal pay, which relates to what women and men are paid for the same or similar jobs or work of equal value. Our approach to pay is gender neutral and our analysis confirms that our pay gap is driven by the structure of our workforce.

The regulations require the pay gap figures to be reported in two ways - (i) as a mean and (ii) as a median. The mean calculates the total amount earned across an organisation, divided by the number of people employed. The median looks at the pay of all the people in the range and identifies the mid-point, removing any distorting impacts at either end of the range.

How we calculate mean and median pay difference

As required by the UK legislation, we are publishing data for the one legal entity that employs more than 250 people, St James Group Limited. We also feel it is important to show the total picture for the Berkeley Group which employed approximately 2,750 people across its business in the UK, regardless of employing entity, and are therefore also voluntarily publishing consolidated data for the entire Group.

Berkeley's gender pay statistics

We included all relevant employees under the regulations as at 5 April 2020 when calculating the figures below. The salary data includes base salary and certain allowances in line with the government guidelines, whilst bonus figures include total variable pay over the previous 12 months (bonus, commissions and other incentives paid, plus vesting of Long Term Incentive Plan awards).

Berkeley Group

The fall this year in the mean pay gap for both the Group and St James includes the effects of temporary Covid-19 salary reductions implemented in April 2020, reducing the pay on a graduated basis with the pay of senior management reduced by 20%.

Understanding our pay gap

The median pay gap for the Group is 34.2%, and like much of our industry, this is primarily driven by the shape of our workforce, with a lower proportion of women in senior, higher paid roles, and more women occupying junior, lower paid roles.

Berkeley Group

The shape of our workforce also impacts our bonus gap, with our senior executives participating in the Company's Long Term Incentive Plans.

Addressing the gap

Berkeley is committed to paying for performance equally and fairly, and rewarding and retaining our best people. We are already taking steps that will increase the proportion of women within Berkeley as a whole, recognising the desire in the Group to promote from within and therefore providing increased opportunities for career progression within the organisation and to more senior roles over the long-term.

Central to this is to recruit and retain a high calibre workforce and in February 2021 we launched two new commitments within Our Vision, Berkeley's long-term strategy, to help achieve this.

The first focus area is 'Employee Experience' which will see us place a specific focus on several areas, including employee experience and diversity and inclusion.

There is a historic under-representation of women in our industry and we believe there are real benefits in ensuring diverse views, skills and perspectives which can lead to creative thinking and more effective problem solving. We have committed to focusing on creating an engaged and inclusive environment by developing guiding principles and seeking to attract and retain a diverse workforce.

Since we last reported we have implemented enhanced maternity and paternity policies, with the view of attracting and retaining more women. In addition to this, we have introduced a more agile approach to working to attract and retain a more diverse pool of talent.

In addition to these initiatives, as a business we understand the importance of recruiting responsibly to help with the progression of women within the business. In the last year we have completed a range of activities to address this. We have undertaken a full review of our recruitment processes and adapted our experienced hire application journey to make the candidate experience more inclusive and streamlined. 60% of all hires that come through our internal recruitment team are female, filling roles with a range of seniority across multiple disciplines.

A focus has also been placed on the importance of gender diversity on interview panels. As a result an increased number of females have been included in the graduate recruitment assessment process to provide better gender balance and to act as ambassadors for women in the industry.

New diversity and unconscious bias training has been introduced to provide employees with a better understanding of how biases affect recruitment and progression decisions and help to mitigate against them.

Recruiting females into the business is a key step to addressing the gap but to strengthen the output we have also committed to increasing the level of women in management positions to 33% by 2026 to be more representative of our overall workforce.

Our second commitment focuses on 'Future Skills' looking at how we can create tangible long term change within the industry.

Our graduate scheme continues to target a balanced intake each year, aiming to identify the next generation of leaders within the organisation.  This will naturally take a period of time but we are investing for the long term. We are also focused on providing apprenticeships, through recruitment and for existing employees, in order to improve skills within both Berkeley and the wider industry. Our supply chain apprenticeship programmes have excelled in the recruitment of women into the built environment and trade apprenticeships in the last four years.

We have a number of affiliations with companies that promote women to work in the built environment. Most recently, we have enhanced a long standing relationship with Women into Construction by becoming a Platinum Member.


We confirm that the data reported is accurate.

Rob Perrins | Chief Executive, Berkeley Group
Richard Stearn | Finance Director, Berkeley Group