I have always felt that job ads should include salary information. The main reason is not to waste anyone's time. Often a narrow salary range or a clear link between requirements and salary are much more informative than a job description. I have experienced to apply to a job opening and go through one or more interviews only to find out that the company is actually hiring for a more junior position than the ad copy implied.

A second reason is to avoid discrimination. Applicants that feel disadvantaged, even if they are actually qualified, may hesitate to negotiate for a higher salary in the same way that a other applicants would. The consequence is that they start with a lower salary. This applies specially to women. Plenty of research shows that they are less likely to negotiate their salary.

Research[1] suggests that pay transparency leads to lower average salaries because employers avoid paying higher wages to any one employee to avoid costly negotiations with others. The effect is small, around 2%, and it disappears with increasing degree of unionization. In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w28903

Cautiously pleased about this. Some companies in UK pay senior devs £30-35k. And some companies won't discuss that until v late in the process, while importing US-style multiround interviews. It's pretty silly when people get 3 rounds in, take time off work for the interviews, then find out their expectations are so far apart.

Besides ‘salary disclosure’, one other law that really helps improve salary is to ban potential employers from asking candidates’ current/previous salary. This avoids potential employers from offering just marginally better than candidates previous roles…

Do they say something about the min and max in the range being no more than X% apart? To prevent scenarios like "between £20,000 and £100,000".

actual salary = min(salary range);

Can we also make it mandatory to reply to a job application, even just an automated "sorry, your application has been rejected", so you know whether to keep considering that job?

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Such laws do not really help in practice. Does a 60-90k range in EU, commonly given to engineering roles, offer any real guidance? A better system would be publishing the average salary for a similar role, but that would be a privacy problem for a low headcount team, or if the role doesn't exist yet... This is a really hard problem.

Would that actually be a good thing? When a company publishes the salary range, that means the job seeker agrees to that range, including maybe getting the lower part of the range. Companies know that, and now they have the advantage to put lower ranges.

How is that going to work if you interview Bob for X task at Y pay, but discover Bob would be much better suited for A task that is worth more salary? What if Bob didn't meet the requirements for X, but would be a perfect fit for B task that is not worth as much salary?

Labour's approach to problems is to tax employers into oblivion and then say "the reason salaries are so low is because we didn't ban them from posting adverts without salary disclosure".

Why do they have to disclose the obvious? The salary is GBP 25000 gross annually.