Gender Pay Gap Report 2024

About us:

Iceland Foods is a unique British food retailer with around 1,000 stores throughout the UK, further owned or franchised stores across Europe and a global export business. We employ around 26,000 colleagues across our Iceland and Food Warehouse, with a further 1,000 colleagues employed from our Head Office in Deeside, North Wales.

Any UK business employing more than 250 employees must publicly report on the difference in pay between its male and female employees. This is known as the gender pay gap. The gender pay gap is different to equal pay.  Equal pay compares the salary of men and women in jobs of equal value; whilst the gender pay gap shows the difference in the average earnings between all men and women in the entire organisation regardless of what role they undertake.  UK Government requirements dictate that the reporting is based on male and female genders only, though we acknowledge that some of our colleagues may identify otherwise.

Iceland is committed to equal opportunity in recruitment and employment irrespective of gender. Our entire pay principles are based on the skills required to deliver in role and our desire to attract and retain talent within the organisation.

Our pay system spans all salary bands ranging from operational to managerial level across all our Iceland and Food Warehouse stores and at our head office in Deeside.

We are committed to a continual improvement gender balance throughout our business enabled by inclusive people policies and processes. These are kept in review to ensure that they remain relevant, and we will regularly involve our colleagues in this process to ensure voices across all groups are heard.

We are pleased to report a decrease in our mean gender pay gap to 8.97% from 9.33% in the previous year. This represents relatively small but positive progress, and a significant reduction of 4.26 percentage points since we started reporting the mean gender pay gap. This is an improvement of over 32%.

We see a similar long-term reduction in the median gender pay gap, which for 2024 remained static at 8.76%, but equates to a 3.52 percentage point reduction over the past 5 years. This is again a significant improvement of 29%.

We acknowledge that within the retail industry it is common place for more females to be in lower paid roles than males. However, we’re committed to ensuring that our internal development programmes, which offer opportunities for progression into higher paid roles, are available and suitable for all. Such progression takes time to impact the balance for more senior roles, but the positive direction of our gender pay gap over time demonstrates that the approach remains effective and sustained.

The median gender bonus gap has dropped significantly by 25.21% against the gap seen in 2023. We are very pleased to share that the median gender bonus gap for 2024 is 0%, and so absolute parity has been achieved on this element. This means, if you were to line up our female colleagues in order of the bonus they received and did the same for our male colleagues, the bonus received by the colleague in the mid-point of each of those lines would be exactly the same. This achievement reflects our fair approach to reward practices, which are awarded purely based on role and performance.

We did see a difference in the proportion of male colleagues receiving a bonus, at 7.40%, against female colleagues of which 3.55% received a bonus. This is due to a post-Christmas bonus being awarded to all Area Managers and Store Managers. Whilst the bonus amounts were consistent by role, there are a higher number of male colleagues in these roles than females.

These results underline significant developments in reducing the gender pay gap over recent years, both for the hourly rates of pay and bonuses. Whilst this represents positive progress, we recognise there is still more to be done to achieve a greater gender-parity in pay. We are committed not only to continued transparency in the reporting of our statistics, but also to ensuring that recruitment and progression opportunities within the business are inclusive of all colleagues.

I confirm that our data is accurate and has been calculated in accordance with the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017.

Tarsem Dhaliwal
Chief Executive Officer

2023 Gender Pay Gap Report