Exclusive – the extent of Birmingham City Council’s equal pay claims revealed
Birmingham City Council House (Image: Local Democracy Reporting Service)
The total cost of equal pay claims against Birmingham City Council is understood to be £250 million, with around 6,000 claims agreed in a landmark deal, we can reveal today.
Insiders say the deal struck has been reached after lengthy discussions amid hopes it will finally end the council’s catastrophic and very costly failure to halt discriminatory pay practices.
The council and unions have refused to be drawn on the details, claiming it is legally sensitive.
But BirminghamLive can reliably report that the figure is in the region of £250m. That’s much less than the originally predicted liability of ‘up to £760m’ which triggered the council’s de facto bankruptcy.
READ MORE: Equal pay victory for women at Birmingham City Council
Up to 6,000 workers in ‘female majority’ departments and services in the council, schools and the children’s trust successfully claimed the council had been underpaying them for years compared to colleagues in male-dominated services.
The use of ‘task and finish’ by mostly male bins crews – exposed by BirminghamLive in 2022 – saw crews knock off early, while some roles on the wagons were decried as ‘over graded’, triggering a fresh wave of claims.
The council’s attempts to deal with the issue by axing one problematic role on the bin trucks triggered the 2025 bin strike that has raged since.
UNISON, GMB and Birmingham City Council have signed the agreement to settle historic equal pay claims brought by the two unions on behalf of women employed by the council and Birmingham Children’s Trust.
Labour leader of the city council Coun John Cotton said the deal put right a ‘historic’ wrong. “When I was appointed as leader two years ago, I labelled equal pay the single biggest challenge the council faced and vowed to deal with the matter once and for all.
“We’re doing exactly that and this deal represents another key milestone on our journey.”
Unions and the council will now be working on getting the money ‘into the hands of workers’ – a process expected to take a matter of weeks.
Megan Fisher, of the GMB, said: “After years of discrimination and being paid less than they were worth, [the female staff] stood up and demanded what was theirs.”
She thanked the council for its “constructive approach to negotiations” and said the agreement reached was a “historic step”.
Claire Campbell, Unison regional manager, said: “This agreement marks a turning point for hundreds of low-paid women, who have waited far too long for justice and equal pay.”
She said the council had shown “its dedication and commitment towards equal pay and future change”.
Equal pay – a Birmingham disaster
Since the groundbreaking Equal Pay Act of 1970, it has been enshrined in law that women and men should be paid equally for doing equal work. It forbids employers from discriminating between workers on the basis of gender.
The Act was triggered by the strike by Ford sewing machinists in Dagenham in 1968, finally forcing the then-Wilson Government to confront the issue.
Immortalised in the film Made In Dagenham, Ford had tried to cut the grading and pay of the female workforce compared to their male colleagues. (Incidentally, despite being hailed as a breakthrough, it was 1984 before those workers finally got true parity).
Yet somehow, decades on, Birmingham City Council managed to fail to meet its duty to women workers.
Some £1.1 billion had been paid out by 2017 to deal with multiple ‘generations’ of claims.
But it wasn’t long before the council, the biggest in Europe, faced new problems.
READ MORE: Birmingham is a super diverse city – these are the facts about who lives where
The male-dominated bins and parks services was blamed. Managers had apparently failed to impose the strict conditions that were needed to avoid future claims. ‘Task and finish’ – the practice of knocking off early once a route was done – was allowed to flourish again in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic.
Equally-graded workers elsewhere who had no such opportunity to depart early had a strong case for discrimination.
In early 2023 the issue escalated dramatically. Then-chief executive Deborah Cadman and council leader John Cotton announced the expected new generation of equal pay claims could land the council with a liability in the ‘ballpark’ of £560m to £650m.
The figure was cited in documents declaring the council’s financial distress, and repeated in legal documents, the council chamber and Parliament.
It was a huge enough figure to trigger formal Section 114 notices warning of financial distress, which in turn led to a Government takeover, the imposition of commissioners, a spending and recruitment freeze and devastating cuts to jobs and services.