THE PAY gap between men and women working for Worcestershire County Council and other local authorities, will be published by the end of March.

With the issue convulsing the BBC, it has risen up the political agenda and county hall will be making public its analysis by the end of March, as it is required to by the government.

Richard Taylor, Interim Head of Human Resources at Worcestershire County Council said: "New regulations require all public sector organisations to publish their gender pay gap by 31 March 2018. We are currently collating the detailed information required against the Government criteria.”

The news will please Councillor Richard Udall who represents St John in Worcester on the county council and the city council.

The Labour and Co-operative councillor tweeted this week: “Equal pay at the BBC, good first steps, now for @worcscc to do the same. We still don't know what the gender pay gap is in the Council, we have only been asking for two years. Something to hide perhaps?”

He told The Worcester News: “When I was chairman of the Overview and Scrutiny Performance Board in 2015 I asked for such a figure. I was told that it was too complicated to compile. We had the cabinet member with responsibility for the matter at the time, Councillor Andy Roberts come to our meeting and tell us it couldn’t be done.

“I continued to ask but we were never told what the figures were.

“I think you can’t address the problem until you know what the problem is.”

The county council said until that recently they had been no agreed way of working out a gender pay gap, which meant it hadn’t been able to produce one which meant anything in comparison to other authorities or public bodies.

Mr Taylor said: “Up until now there has been no industry standard calculation so councils have not been able to produce consistent gender pay gap reports."

According to the latest figures form the Office of National Statistics; in 2017, men on average were paid £1.32 more per hour than women, which, as a proportion of men’s pay, is a pay gap of 9.1 per cent. Men are paid a median average of £14.48 per hour and women £13.16 an hour.