Evening Standard comment: We’re trying to replicate the benefits of the EU

The Government says it’s time to listen to the experts. Home Secretary Amber Rudd has asked the Migration Advisory Committee for its view of how many European citizens we “need” to support our economy. She is one of the sane voices in the Cabinet trying to prevent the extra damage a sudden departure from the EU will cause.

Given the impossible task of designing in just 18 months a new immigration system that satisfies the desire of most Brexiteers to see fewer foreigners on the streets while not damaging an already weak British economy, she is trying to do the only sensible thing she can: kick the issue into the long grass with lots of consultation and a lengthy transition period.

However, her promise to business in this morning’s Financial Times that there would be “no cliff edge” was contradicted by her own Immigration Minister, Brandon Lewis, today, who said freedom of movement with the EU would end abruptly in March 2019.

Confusion over the short-term is compounded by concern about the long term. This newspaper is in favour of experts.

However, we are sceptical that any government committee can accurately assess the number of migrants we “need”.

It might just be able to calculate the number of nurses the NHS needs — as that is a centrally-planned public service. But how does it know how many fashion assistants, web designers, minicab drivers, derivative traders, bar staff, lawyers or yoga instructors the country needs? It doesn’t.

A free-market, open, innovative economy can’t have its labour supply dictated by some British Gosplan. It’s the latest example of how Britain is going through the whole process of leaving the EU and then desperately trying to recreate its benefits from the outside.

You don’t need an expert to tell us that: any fool can see it.

Time to close pay gap

The man who co-chairs the Government’s campaign to get more female executives at the top of British business, Sir Philip Hampton, has suggested that the reason for the BBC gender pay gap is that senior women let it happen.

“These ... women are ... now saying: ‘how did we let this happen?’ I suspect they let it happen because they weren’t doing much about it.”

This is, to put it mildly, an unhelpful take on the issue but it usefully expresses a number of misconceptions, the main one being that if women are underpaid by comparison with their male colleagues, then they are to blame.

Self-evidently, the blame lies squarely with a management which awards the greatest rewards to those who ask loudest and most persistently — men — and which is content to pay less to women who do the same work as men just because they can.

As former Cabinet minister Nicky Morgan says, we should by now have moved beyond having to ask for fair pay. And, notwithstanding Sir Philip’s observation that no woman has ever asked him for a rise — it is not quite true that women ask less often for more pay; they just don’t get it as often.

The mindset behind the gender pay gap may be conditioned by the assumption that men are breadwinners whereas women’s income is a supplement. In London, this assumption is flawed; many women are the main or sole providers.

But this consideration should be irrelevant to the larger principle of equal work for equal pay, allowing for the variables of experience and popularity. And on this basis, the disparities exposed by the BBC audit are bizarre.

Sir Philip — who co-chairs the Hampton-Alexander review into increasing the number of women in senior roles in FTSE 350 firms with Dame Helen Alexander — does, however, deserve credit for championing the principle of transparency in the BBC.

It should not have taken this compulsory exercise to make the Corporation pay women their due, but now that it has, it must address the discrepancies that have been exposed.