Exemptions
In FPR, foundations are exempt from criteria which do not apply to them. For instance, a foundation with few staff, or no staff, is exempt from the criterion about publishing the gender pay gap of its staff.
The table below shows which types of foundation are exempt from which criteria.
For this current Year Three (2023/24), we changed one exemption rule. That is the exemption on publishing a diversity plan: formerly, any foundation with ten or fewer staff was exempted from this; now that is five or fewer staff. This is mainly because if you encounter a foundation with ten staff who are all demographically identical, the chances that this is a random chance is really low, and the foundation should have a plan to improve that. Indeed, the number of staff that a foundation can have, where, if they are demographically identical, that is from random chance, seems rather lower than ten. Five seems a better number.
FPR now gathers some additional information though these do not count towards foundations’ scores or their ratings. The information gathered is:
- about the diversity of foundations’ staff and trustees, where they publish it. In Years One and Two, we noted whether foundations disclosed those data but we did not log those data; In 2023, after the Year Two report published, we gathered those data in order to start tracking whether and how the diversity is changing (we published the 2023 data about that here). In Year Three, we will gather those data at the same time as we gather everything else.
- about the diversity of foundations’ applicants and grantees, where they publish it. We will also note what definitions the foundations use, e.g., how they define a ‘Black-led organisation’. This suggestion arose through our consultation to inform Year Three. In future years, we may create criteria related to this information.
- We now only count information which is less than three years old. That is a new rule this year. So a foundation which, say, published data on its pay gap from six years ago would have received credit for that in Year Two but would not do so henceforth.
[1] The legal requirement is only for employers with over 250 staff. Very few foundations have that many staff. We used 50 staff as our exemption ceiling because that was the original recommendation to government by a report which it commissioned in 2017 from Baroness McGregor-Smith: https://assets.publishing.