Webbs Gender Pay Report 2025

2025 Gender Pay Report – Working for diversity at Webbs
 

At Webbs we value the differences which a diverse workforce brings; it’s important our team reflects the wide range of customers we serve on a day-to-day basis.  Webbs is a family business where colleagues can be themselves and where everyone is encouraged to reach their full potential.  We make our decisions about recruitment, reward and promotion on the basis of merit alone. In our last employee engagement survey, 86% of our team agreed that “people here are treated fairly regardless of their gender".

We welcome the opportunity to analyse our gender pay gap as this helps to inform our discussions about career progression for all colleagues. The results for 2025 challenge us to keep asking ourselves how we will continue to develop an even more inclusive and diverse team. While the figures are valuable for the awareness they raise, they are only a part of the bigger picture. At Webbs we are actively listening to and involving our colleagues on all levels via internal forums and team surveys to help us deliver more career development opportunities.

How are we progressing?

* Based on data from the Department for International Trade Gender Pay Report 2025

Our median gender pay gap was 0% at 5 April 2025; another way of looking at this is when comparing median hourly rates of pay, women earn the same £ for £ per hour as men. Our mean gender pay gap was 6.9% at 5 April 2025, which is a 1.3ppts increase from last year. The mean gender pay gap reflects a much higher volume of female employees on shorter-hour and variable contracts across our teams and we have more females overall working in our business at 64.2% at 5 April 2025.

Given the significant National Living and Minimum Wage increases in April 2025 impacting 80% of our colleagues (more than ever before), this means that more females are therefore paid at these base rates and the level of these increases gives us, as a business, very little scope to increase pay rates further for anyone else to make a difference to these pay gaps going forwards. Whilst we have more males in senior management positions in the company, this continues to be addressed, with more females (53.5%) than males in the upper quartile of pay rates in the business. We did not have any major changes to senior management positions in the 12 months to 5 April 2025 which would have had a material impact on the pay gap, although there have been a number of changes since April 2025 which continue to address this, including a new female on the Board of Directors since Q4 2025 and more females in our Senior Management Structure. This should help reduce our mean pay gap when reporting the period to April 2026

We are pleased with these results which are based on 452 relevant full-pay employees. The scores are broadly consistent, with 15 fewer employees included in the data reported at 5 April 2025 versus the previous year, of which two thirds were female in the 3 lower quartiles of the hourly pay scales. As at 5 April 2025, we only excluded 3 employees from the above gender pay gap calculations due to being on Maternity leave. The analysis is therefore fully representative of our business.

We are proud to say that we have been operating our Specialist Training Guarantee since February 2018, where we provide funding for a variety of training courses for our team members, ranging from AAT to RHS qualifications.  We also run a Future Leaders Programme that is open to all colleagues from team member level and upwards.  During the year we had 9 team leaders successfully complete an accelerated programme, 6 of which were female.
Our management programme attracted 3 new candidates, 2 female and 1 male who were successful in completing a year-long programme which included formal and informal learning, mentoring and leadership skills.  These colleagues have been retained in the business and 4 have gone on to receive promotions, 3 of which are female.
Our career paths link performance to reward in all areas of our business.  We have seen a number of colleagues progress up through the three career path levels as they take on responsibilities and develop specialisms; this helps to show how we reward and promote fairly on the basis of merit and performance, irrespective of gender or any other irrelevant factors.
 

Rewarding across the team:
Within the reporting period, bonus pay was received by 89% of men and 95.9% of women. Bonus pay includes our non-contractual annual profit share scheme, open to all team members who’ve been employed for at least part of the previous year, albeit no such profit share payment was made in April 2025 due to the business making reduced profits in the previous financial year. The only bonus payments made in the 12mth period to April 2025 included Christmas gift vouchers (all colleagues in work at Christmas and who have worked over 30 hours in the business in the financial year receive this bonus payment), Webbs Way Awards, “thank you’s” to our First Aiders – these are what the bonus payments are based on in this year of reporting. The only reason why a small few didn’t receive a bonus payment was due to them being new starters with the business in the previous 3 months prior to the 5 April 2025 snapshot date.

Normally, the statutory reporting method for the Gender Pay Report doesn’t allow for bonuses to be converted into full time equivalents which makes the bonus gap seem wider, and as a higher percentage of senior managers are male, this explains the mean bonus gap reported in the period at 9.2%, albeit a significant reduction from the mean gap last year at 50.8%. Our median bonus pay gap remains at 0% which reflects the equality and fairness in how we assess and allocate bonus payments across all of our colleagues. Our profit share distribution is carefully moderated to ensure that such payments are made on a fair and equal basis across our teams.

How are Webbs doing more?
Webbs continues to focus on the following areas of support for our workforce. These key pillars will allow us to continue growing diversity, equality and to open out pathways to progress across the business:

• Investing in a new integrated HR & Payroll System which has gone live in March 2026. This will be a fully transparent, interactive and digital system for all colleagues to manage all payroll documentation and benefits/entitlements accordingly;
• Investing in the Webbs team by building our internal talent pools through our Specialist Training Guarantee, Career Paths and Future Leaders Programme;
• Promoting opportunities for flexible and part time working for all team members;

• Listening to colleagues to understand perceived barriers to career progression for all groups including women.

I certify that this information is accurate to the best of my knowledge.

Oliver Nation
Finance Director, Webbs Garden Centres Limited