By now, you probably know the basic facts: in September 2023, Birmingham city council announced it could no longer balance its books, and was effectively declaring bankruptcy. The council’s statement blamed “financial liabilities relating to equal pay claims and an in-year financial gap within its budget”. The statement said these equal pay claims were “in the region of £650m to £760m, with an ongoing liability accruing at a rate of £5m to £14m per month”. It did not expand on the other financial issues facing the council. This set the tone for the coverage that followed, with headlines focusing on the role of the equal pay claims in Birmingham’s financial collapse. In these headlines, there has been another implicit message: that women are to blame.
Clearly, pay discrimination was a massive, costly problem in Birmingham, which, like most other councils around the country, was systematically paying female employees less than men in equivalent jobs. But, as many commentators have pointed out, equal pay was not the only – or even, arguably, the main – factor in the council’s financial issues. All local authorities are suffering the effect of catastrophic cuts imposed by Conservative-led governments since 2010. Back in 2017, when I wrote about the Trojan horse scandal in Birmingham, a councillor described the budget cuts as “soul-destroying”; that was seven years ago, and the situation has only worsened. Central government grants to local councils were cut by 40% in real terms between 2010 and 2020, at the same time as demand for services such as child social care increased. After 14 years of cuts, nearly one in five councils now believe it is “fairly or very likely” they will become insolvent in the next 15 months.
On top of this general context, there are numerous examples of specific mismanagement at Birmingham. The most dramatic surrounds the installation of the Oracle IT system for payments and HR systems. There is nothing wrong with Oracle itself – but it was badly implemented, a disaster that ended up costing about £130m, more than six times the original budget. James Brackley of the Audit Reform Lab, who has investigated Birmingham council’s issues, recently suggested that the council would have had to declare insolvency over the implementation of the Oracle system anyway, regardless of the equal pay claim.
Given all this, why did the council highlight equal pay as the main cause of its economic woes? Brackley suggests that blaming equal pay is expedient for the council as it places part of the blame on trade unions, rather than solely on the council’s own executives. I wonder if there’s a more insidious, less tangible reason, too. Stretching back to the Ford Dagenham case in 1968, which led to the right to equal pay being enshrined in law, women have been told that if they demand to be paid equally, job losses will follow.
Stefan Cross KC, the founder of Action 4 Equality Scotland, the law firm that represented a large number of equal pay claimants in Birmingham and around the country, told me: “There’s always this underlying threat made against women, that somehow your job is not as important as men’s jobs, and you’re putting other people’s jobs at risk.” This was quite explicitly said to women working for Birmingham council back in 2005, when the first equal pay claims were filed. The same thing was said to women working for Glasgow city council, which has to date paid out about £760m to its female workforce. And no doubt the argument will continue to be made, as equal pay claims are entered at more local authorities around the country.
This has played out in Birmingham before. In 2012, the council lost a hearing at the supreme court and ended up paying out an astonishing £1.1bn to female workers. To fund this, it had to sell off assets, including the National Exhibition Centre. Some people held women responsible. In 2014, one female claimant told the Guardian: “I don’t feel guilty. I worked for it. People say ‘how dare you?’ But whose fault is that? If they had paid us properly in the first place … ”
The reason Birmingham council still has issues with equal pay, more than a decade later, is that after the 2012 ruling, it failed to adequately address the underlying problems, and some of the worst practices were reinstated during the pandemic. Given this mismanagement, it was something of a strange choice to emphasise the role of equal pay in its financial problems in 2023. Perhaps it is testament to the power of the implicit, deeply rooted idea that women should simply take it on the chin and accept lower pay for the common good.
It is true that local authorities today – after 14 years of drastically reduced funding – are particularly badly placed to deal with a new wave of equal pay claims. But councils face a number of financial timebombs – from wildly escalating costs for special educational needs provision, to a soaring annual spend on temporary accommodation. So why is it that the question of women being paid equally for their work is always seen as one demand too many?
What is beyond debate is that the impact on local populations when councils fail is devastating. Birmingham recently announced cuts of £300m to public services, including adult social care and children’s services, as well as a staggering 21% rise in council tax. It will have to sell £750m of assets. But none of this is the fault of women who, in many cases, spent years working overtime to make ends meet, only to discover that men in equivalent jobs were being paid significantly more. As claimants in Glasgow told me, even if you win the money eventually, you can’t get the time back: hours that could have been spent with loved ones, or resting aching limbs. This is a terrible financial moment for councils, but no matter how inconvenient the timing, female workers cannot continue to bear the cost.
Samira Shackle is a freelance journalist and a regular contributor to the Guardian long read. She is the author of Karachi Vice
