About Coventry City Council
Name: Susanna Chilton, Director of People and Facilities
Organisation: Coventry City Council
Website: www.coventry.gov.uk
Industry: Government Administration
Region: UK
Product: Brightmine Pay Equity Analytics
Contributing: Nicole Powell, Head of Employee Relations
As a local authority, Coventry City Council holds itself to a high standard for transparent, justifiable pay as a public body spending taxpayers’ money. However, to produce and analyse the data was a laborious process using a mixture of in-house tools and another team’s availability. Using Brightmine Pay Equity Analytics, the council is now able to produce in-depth gender pay gap reports and has the foundation it needs for future ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting requirements.
How Brightmine Pay Equity Analytics helped
The challenge
High scrutiny, laborious tools and processes
In a local authority environment, pay equity work carries a high level of responsibility and scrutiny. Senior salaries are published publicly, and the council is expected to demonstrate best practice because it is spending taxpayer money. That scrutiny is sharpened by a heavily unionised environment, where reporting has to be clear, credible and able to withhold challenge.
“We are a heavily trade unionised environment… they actually play a big part in all things D&I.”
— Nicole Powell, Head of Employee Relations
Knowing what to do was one thing, the harder part was the how. The council already had in-house tools, but having pay analysis dependent on another team’s workflow wasn’t sustainable. They also had the added challenge of helping people across the organisation understand and act upon it, explaining key concepts like mean and median to non-specialists so pay conversations could be informed and constructive.
The Brightmine solution
A simpler, self-service platform for pay analysis
Brightmine Pay Equity Analytics is an intuitive, self-serve platform that helps organisations identify, understand and address pay disparities across gender, ethnicity, disability and more. It makes pay data straightforward to load, analyse and explore, so HR teams can quickly go from raw figures to insight without needing expensive specialist support.
For Coventry City Council, that self-sufficiency was the appeal, and Susanna’s verdict on the tool sums it up: “it’s simple, and really easy to use.” The timing fits too. With ethnicity and disability pay reporting on the horizon, the council want to get ahead of the requirements rather than leave it to the last minute when the full requirements are known.
Self-sufficiency didn’t mean going alone. For an organisation whose pay figures have to stand up to public and union scrutiny, the accuracy of the underlying data matters as much as the analysis built on top of it, and that is where the Brightmine team has stayed close. The relationship didn’t end at onboarding. The team continues to work alongside Coventry’s people to sense-check the data, raise anything that doesn’t look right, and refine how the information is used, so the council can trust what it reports.
Implementation & results
Once up and running on the platform, the council’s pay equity work started to look very different in practice, specifically: who could produce the reporting, how it held up to scrutiny with external stakeholders, and what the council could finally see beneath the headlines.
Reporting the council can run for itself
The friction that started the search was independence: pay analysis sat within another team’s workflow, and the council wanted its own people working directly with the data. That changed once the platform was in. Nicole was able to run the most recent gender pay gap report herself, without waiting on another team to produce it, and the output was both quicker to generate and more detailed than what the council could manage before. Producing the reporting in-house also gave the team more confidence in the figures it puts forward.
Evidence that stands up with the trade unions
In a heavily unionised environment, pay reporting has to withstand high-level scrutiny, not just inform it. Clearer data changed both what the council could put in front of the unions and how that conversation went.
“Trade union wise, we could put a really good presentation together. They couldn’t argue against it, and you can see where some of the hot spots are, you can see where the numbers and the service impact.”
— Susanna Chilton, Director of People and Facilities
Getting to the “so what” behind the gap
For years, Coventry City Council’s headline gender pay gap had wobbled without an obvious cause, landing slightly above a comparable male salary one year and slightly below it the next. Being able to interrogate the data, rather than just produce it, let the team find what was actually moving the number.
“We have discovered it’s the number of part-time female employees that we’ve got that created that gap for us.”
— Susanna Chilton, Director of People and Facilities
That root-cause view is what turns a compliance issue into something the council can act on through allowances applied consistently and a sharper look at starting salaries.
Conclusion
For Coventry City Council, Brightmine Pay Equity Analytics has helped make pay equity reporting a more strategic, sustainable part of its people agenda — improving the clarity of analysis, strengthening stakeholder conversations, and laying a foundation for the reporting requirements still to come. The work ahead is challenging, but the council can now see its disparities clearly and build the case for change on solid data.
“
Pay Equity Analytics is simple and really easy to use because, once you have the data in, you can play with it in a number of ways.
Susanna Chilton,
Director of People and Facilities