There’s precious little that Theresa May – the state school educated daughter-of-a-vicar – has in common with her Old Etonian son-of-a-stockbroker predecessor David Cameron. And doesn’t she want you to know it? But in her pledge this week on workers’ rights – a pitch for the kind of Labour voters who wouldn’t have been seen dead backing the last Prime Minister – Mrs May built on Mr Cameron’s decision to force larger companies to report on the gap between what men and women are paid. She announced a similar policy for black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) employees. Both Tory PMs clearly believe, to quote Mr Cameron, that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” – that revealing the gender and ethnic pay gap in our workplaces to the world is the most effective way of changing corporate behaviour. Mrs May would like to think she’s a lot more serious about this kind of stuff than the Bullingdon Boys who ruled the roost before her. She’s talked repeatedly about tackling “burning injustice” – and we’re encouraged to see the pay policy through that prism. But if progress to date on the gender pay regulations are anything to go by, Mrs May is about to find out that tackling burning injustice involves holding business feet to the fire. Since the new rules came into force, requiring companies employing more than 250 people to publish details of their gender pay gap, just seven have done so on this Government website. They include a window-blind manufacturer from Cheshire, an umbrella company in Colchester, the youth hostels charity YMCA, a cleaning company in Knowsley and the Official Register of Land and Property in Scotland. Good on them for getting their act together. That leaves 8,993 still to comply. Admittedly, they have until April 2018 to publish. Many huge companies are, of course, still collecting the information – it takes time to work through all those numbers. But one piece of research found that a third of bosses don’t believe the pay gap is a ‘business issue’. I asked my own employer, ITN, when they’d be revealing their record. A spokesperson said: “ITN is committed to providing an equal and diverse workplace for all employees, and we welcome the gender pay gap review. We have just begun collating the relevant data as part of this process with the intention of publishing our results in advance of the deadline in April next year.” But campaigners fear that many businesses will drag their feet until the last minute, to ensure that any embarrassing pay differentials get buried in a mass of data. The potential for embarrassment is fairly sizeable. Employers must publish annual figures for both their mean and median gender pay gaps, covering salaries and bonuses. And they must state the number of men and women each salary quartile. Although overall difference between men and women’s full-time median hourly pay fell from 9.6 per cent in 2015 to 9.4 per cent in 2016 – not OK, but at least improving – the figures remain skewed by the number of men in top jobs. The gap for top-earning men and women – around 20 per cent – has hardly altered since 1997. The glass ceiling remains virtually intact. The data for BAME employees, when it finally emerges, won’t spare business blushes either. The Trades Union Congress released figures last year suggesting that black graduates earn on average £14.33 an hour, compared with £18.63 for their white counterparts. But if Mrs May is really serious about fighting serious injustice, she may need to do more than simply adopt her predecessor’s adage of letting the sunlight in.