Gender Pay Gap 2025

The Hotel Folk is one single legal entity which employs more than 250 employees over six Hotels, a Golf Course, Spa and a Country Club. We are committed to ensuring equal pay between women and men for equal work, and equality in all contractual terms and benefits. This is not only our legal obligation in continuing to ensure we comply with the Equality Act 2010 but we also strongly feel this to be our ongoing moral obligation too. We believe we continue to pay fairly based on the Company's business performance and market conditions.

What is the gender pay gap?

The gender pay gap is the difference between the average (mean or median) earnings of men and women across a workforce. The figures contained in this report have been calculated using the methodology stipulated by UK legislation. Equal Pay highlights the pay differences between men and women who carry out the same jobs, similar jobs, or work of equal value. As such, no inference can or should be made about equal pay using gender pay gap information.

The Hotel Folk is required by law to publish an annual gender pay gap report and this report is for 5 April 2025.

Mean Gender Pay Gap

This is a comparison of the average hourly rate of pay for men compared to the average hourly rate of women. This snapshot date, the figure is 18.4% (+7%). This means that the average hourly rate for men is 18.4% higher than the average hourly rate for women. All our Head Chefs, our CEO and two out of five Hotel Managers are male. Most of our chefs (20 out of 25) are also male and these skilled roles tend to be higher earning and therefore skew the overall pay gap in this area.

In contrast of the 11 members of our Executive Team (which includes Hotel and other Head Office managers) 8 are female. 23 out of 38 management roles are also held by women showing a larger overall proportion of females in management. This can beseen in the changing demographic of our quartile distribution in the section below.

Economic pressures in the most recent budgets have restricted the amount of paywhich could be awarded to these roles generally, which means that despite in practicehaving a better balance of women than men in senior roles, this is not reflected in the mean GPG figure.

Median Pay Gap

This shows the difference in the middle hourly rate of pay figure when comparing men and women and tends to be a more useful comparator as it removes the skewing effect that significant outliers (both high and low) can have on other data sets, such as the mean (average).

Hospitality needs to be an agile industry and as such m any people see it as an ideal second job or to top up their income. This means that many of our Folk only w ork a few hours per week which can impact the range of hourly pay rates we see, especially for our female Folk. Our Median Pay Gap is 3.2% (+1.2%) meaning the middle rate for men is 3.2% higher than women. This means that there is only a difference of 3.2% when comparing men and women in a list from lowest hourly rate to highest hourly rate.

Quartile Distribution 

Men and women who were full-pay relevant employees were sorted using their hourly pay then divided into 4 equal quartiles, the percentage of men and women in each quartile is shown below: 

Lower Quartile  45% men (+1%) / 55% women (-1%)

Lower Middle Quartile  40% men (-5%) / 60% women (+5%)

Upper Middle Quartile 53% men (+14%) / 47% women (-14%)

Upper Quartile  56% men (-3%) / 41% women (+3%)

Pay Gap

The data this year continues to demonstrate a more even distribution of both genders in all quartiles. It also shows a rising percentage of women in the Upper Quartile as we have seen more women move into and appointed to management roles.

All our roles have the same pay structure regardless of gender.

The Future

At The Hotel Folk we aim to ensure all colleagues can develop their career regardless of their gender. Economic pressures such as rising wage costs (NMW increases and decreasing NI threshold), unpredictable supplier increases arising from the volatile geopolitical landscape, and changes in consumer spending is restricting our reward strategy.

We remain optimistic that with the implementation of new technologies which will deliver much needed synergies, efficiencies and control across all areas of our operation we can identify extra capacity and generate additional revenue to offset these challenges. We remain committed to the aim of reducing our gender pay gap.

Given the challenges mentioned above we are acutely aware of the value that experienced female hospitality Folk provide to the industry. Where practicable we offer a high level of flexibility regarding working patterns and encourage returnees. Many of our roles fit around school hours or can be undertaken on a part-time basis. We are always looking to remain ahead of the curve rather than having to respond to ongoing challenges and are considering multi-skilled roles at several of our hotels to offer the opportunity for Folk to further develop their careers and learn new skills.

Every "Folk" has a part to play in contributing to The Hotel Folk success and we believe it is important that everyone is rewarded fairly for the performance of our business.

Bonus Pay Gap

The following results are comparing bonus payments, where a bonus is regarded as any payment related to profit sharing, productivity, performance, incentive, or commission, and for The Hotel Folk include employee awards and long service.

The bonus payment percentages are intended to reflect the distribution of bonus payments made to male and female "relevant employees", who were paid bonus pay in the 12 months that ended on the 5th April 2025.

The number of men receiving a bonus this year was 62 whilst 54 women received bonuses. Comparing the average/mean bonus paid to men and women the figure this year was -51.57%, therefore on average women were paid 51.57% more in bonus payments than men, a shift of over 90% from last year, so whilst a greater number of men received bonuses, the amounts paid to women was greater.

This is partly reflective of the fact that our Guest Relations team, which is commission based, is all female, but also the fact significant performance related and Long Service bonuses were paid to female managers in this period, which is an encouraging statistic.

The median bonus pay figure is the difference between the median (middle) bonus pay paid to relevant employees who are men, and the median bonus pay paid to relevant employees who are women, and tends to be a more useful comparator in general terms as it removes the skewing effect that significant outliers (both high and low) can have on other data sets. The median for THF this year is 0% which demonstrates the parity of our reward scheme.

Actions:

1. Continue to support personal and professional development through our online appraisal platform.
2. To continue to encourage uptake of apprenticeships and our Chef Development Program for new recruits to the Kitchen and training our current chefs to further their careers.
3. Continue to review the working conditions and work patterns in our kitchens to provide better work/life balance for kitchen folk where practicable.

I can confirm our data is accurate and has been calculated according to the requirements and methodology set out in the Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties and Public Authorities) Regulations 2017.

Agreed by Mr David Scott, Chief Executive Officer, March 2026