At Karbon Homes, we build, manage and look after homes for people across the North. And then we go further, we give them the strong foundations they need to get on with life.
Since our formation in 2017, we’ve been focused on delivering our three strategic aims - to provide as many good quality homes as we can; to deliver an excellent service to our customers; and to shape strong, sustainable places for our communities.
Our footprint covers the North of England and Yorkshire, with over 34,000 homes across diverse communities where customers face differing opportunities and challenges.
Some customers just need an affordable home, or a way onto the property ladder. Others might need a bit more – financial advice, community services, sheltered accommodation or even training that can lead to a new job. Whatever people need to feel more secure, confident and happy with where they’re at, we’ll aim to provide it.
We always make the effort to really understand our customers. We believe that everyone deserves respect. Everyone’s voice should be heard. And everyone deserves someone in their corner now and then. By focusing on our three strategic aims, combining a sound business head with a strong social heart and staying true to our values, we hope to build strong foundations for even more people.
Mandatory gender pay gap reporting was introduced in 2017 for organisations with over 250 colleagues in the UK. And reassuringly, the pay gap has reduced since its introduction, but there will always be work to do.
Although we continue to remain in a strong position at Karbon, we continually review the demographics of the organisation throughout the year, including the opportunities we can develop to try to balance any pay gap. We’ve seen significant progress with this approach in our LEAD – leadership development programme, which focuses on development internally.
Our partnership with Women in Social Housing also provides networking and development opportunities focused on areas that members tell us affect women. Working in partnership enables our colleagues to network outside of Karbon and with organisations that support social housing, such as construction and law firms.
Encouragingly, this year saw the introduction of some important new national legislation through the Workers Protection Act 2023. It builds on the Equality Act and shifts the focus from an organisation solely reacting to incidents of sexual harassment in the workplace to preventing them. It’s a big step forward. We know from national data that women are more likely to experience harassment at work, so changes like this are vital in creating fairer and safer workplaces – helping to enable women to thrive and progress.
In terms of the pay gap data, nationally, the figures focus on the median, which is where half of colleagues earn more, and half of colleagues earn less. This provides a better measure of the ‘typical’ colleague’s pay. The mean, on the other hand, is a simple average that includes both the highest and lowest paid in an organisation.
At Karbon, we look at both and consider all our data. Our mean gender pay gap has remained within 5% of parity for the past seven years. However, this year, we’ve seen a small increase to 5.5%, although our median pay gap remains strong at 0.9%.
We’re dedicated to creating a workplace where everyone feels they belong, and that includes fair and equal pay. Through our inclusion and belonging ‘Developing Diversity and Creating Fairness’ commitment, we’ll continue to focus on our pay gap reporting, because we believe it’s a crucial and transparent measure of our progress. But it’s not just about the data – it’s about our people. Gender pay gap reporting means more than just publishing our figures once a year. It’s a key part of our wider efforts to build a truly inclusive and fair workplace, for every colleague. We see it as one of the many tools that helps us to understand where we are now, so we can keep pushing for better.
As part of that, we’re once again sharing the latest figures from our Ethnicity Pay Gap and Disability Pay Gap reports. Publishing these results ahead of legislative requirements has been unanimously supported by our leadership team. To support our commitment to this, we've taken part in the Government’s open consultation on disability and ethnicity pay gap reporting. We’ve shared our support and experience for this to become an element of the mandatory reporting.
To get a fuller view of our work, I’d also encourage you to take a look at our Inclusion and Belonging Annual Report, too. It looks at the work we’re doing to improve equality, diversity and inclusion, with real stories from our customers and colleagues that bring our progress to life.
As the authorised signatory of this Pay Gap Report, I am pleased to confirm that the data contained within this report is accurate and meets the requirements of the gender pay gap reporting regulations. The report has been developed using data from a snapshot date of 5 April 2025 and data regarding bonus payments made between 6 April 2024 and 5 April 2025.
Scott Martin – Executive Director, Resources.
Scott Martin – Executive Director, Resources.
As a wholly-owned subsidiary, data from 54North Homes is not included in this report, nor are they required to be published, as their headcount is below 250 colleagues. However, activity across the group to improve gender equality includes all colleagues.
Male FT
Female FT
Male PT
Female PT
Mean pay gap
Median pay gap
Mean bonus gap
Median bonus gap
Gender pay quartiles
| Upper | Upper middle | Lower middle | Lower | |
| Male | 58% | 55% | 69% | 39% |
| Female | 42% | 45% | 31% | 61% |
What does the data tell us about Karbon?
There are several factors that influence our gender pay gap, many of which are not unique to Karbon. We have several roles that have historically and continue to be performed by either men or women (male-dominated or female-dominated), which influences the gender split in our quartiles.
Headcount
The growth in our headcount year-on-year has remained steady. But we have seen a shift in the upper middle quartile with a higher representation of women, and our lower quartile which has also shifted back to a lower representation of men. This will be in part to the different development and employability programmes that we operate at Karbon which support our overall mission. Although we have low numbers of colleagues working part time, our fully flexible ‘Karbon Way of Working’ has seen new work patterns become more popular, Such as working ten days over nine, supporting both our male and female colleagues.
Salaries
At Karbon, all our colleagues* are paid the real living wage or above. We operate a salary benchmarking scheme which supports and ratifies our approach to equal pay. This would explain in part why our median pay gap is reported closer to parity than our mean pay gap.
*With the exception of the New Start programme where we look to external grant funding and employer contributions
We’ll continue to support gender equality at Karbon via our long-term ambitions driven through our Inclusion and Belonging Action Plan. We’ve been making progress, but we know that there is more to do. These include:
Development
We'll continue to develop our colleagues through our interventions and our leadership pathways. Our programmes are open to all colleagues, and we’ve seen a significant number of female colleagues benefit from the approach of our programmes. In the latest cohort of our ‘Aspire to Lead’ programme, selected through anonymous shortlisting, 58% were female with 66% in the previous year.
In our survey* the eNPS for female colleagues was +58 when asked “How likely are you to recommend our organisation as a good place to work?” vs +28 for male colleagues.
*Survey data is taken from our main annual survey in July 2024. We work with partners Hive HR to collect our survey data.
We’ll continue to be open and transparent in our pay gap reporting. We consider it’s equally important for us to publish the ethnicity and disability pay gaps as it is our gender pay gap. We recognise that without a full data set, it can make these reports less meaningful, but we don’t want that to be a barrier. We’ll continue to work to improve our data, which will in turn improve our reporting.
We’ve used the same approach as the gender pay gap for these calculations using the binary calculation and splitting our data into two categories – majority and minority cohorts.
For the disability pay gap, the majority cohort includes all colleagues without a disability and the minority cohort includes all colleagues who have recorded data of having a disability or long-term health condition.
Those reporting having a disability is low in comparison to regional data, but we also know through work with our neurodiversity and cancer inclusion hubs that not all colleagues see their conditions as a disability. We’re working to improve the clarity around the categories as laid out by the census 2021 and in turn the data collection of colleagues.
For the ethnicity pay gap, the majority cohort includes all white British colleagues, and the minority cohort includes all other ethnic groups.
Where we have unidentified data i.e., ‘not known’ or ‘prefer not to say’ this has been removed from the calculations, but it is shown in our overall headcount figures. Removing data from the data set provides a less accurate picture, but this is something experienced by all organisations that are reporting additional pay gaps.
Equality pay gap reporting
Headcount
Majority
Minority
Unknown
Mean pay gap
Median pay gap
| Upper | Upper middle | Lower middle | Lower | |
| Majority | 96% | 97% | 93% | 95% |
| Minority | 4% | 3% | 7% | 5% |
We have seen a 3% reduction in our ‘unknown’ data, and an increase in our minority cohort data and a subsequent increase in representation. There has been an increase in representation in all but the lower quartile. The mean pay gap has seen a 2.7% decrease and we’ve seen a further reduction in the median pay gap of 2.1%. We’ll continue to develop our recruitment approaches and place-based programmes to make Karbon more attractive to people from different ethnicities that represent the communities we work in.
Disability pay gap reporting
Headcount
Majority
Minority
Unknown
Mean pay gap
Median pay gap
| Upper | Upper middle | Lower middle | Lower | |
| Majority | 94% | 94% | 97% | 93% |
| Minority | 6% | 6% | 3% | 7% |
There is a further reduction in our unknown data for this year. However, we’ve seen some fluctuation in the quartiles compared to last year with the upper middle and lower middle both seeing a reduction in minority cohort representation. This has resulted in a small increase of 1.4% in the mean pay gap and the median pay gap remaining static. We’ll continue our work toward our Level 3 Disability Confident and working with our specialist recruitment partner to continue to build the work in this area.
We’ll continue to improve our data and commit to publishing our ethnicity and disability pay gaps and act within our Inclusion and Belonging Action plan to improve our representation at all levels of our organisation.
