About 1,600 equal pay claims have been lodged against Brighton and Hove City Council, citing potential gender pay inequality.
The GMB union announced that it was lodging an equal pay claim in June last year but took some months to provide details.
Since receiving the claims, the council has taken legal advice on potential gender pay inequality.
And the council’s external auditor Grant Thornton flagged up the legal claims as a financial risk in its latest report to the council’s Audit, Standards and General Purposes Committee.
The auditor’s findings were included in a report to the committee at Hove Town Hall yesterday (Tuesday 24 June).
It said: “The council has a job evaluation scheme against which all jobs are evaluated and keeps under review its pay and allowances structure.
“The council considers that the claims are defensible and has commissioned external legal advice to undertake detailed analysis and advise the council on potential defences or any potential risks they may pose.
“This process is likely to take at least two years.”
The council’s gender pay report last year found that women employed by the council earned more than men and made up more of the workforce.
The mean hourly pay for men was £18.46 while women were paid £19.78 – a pay gap of minus 7.2 per cent.
The median hourly rate was narrower, with men earning £17.12 an hour and women £17.63 – a minus 3 per cent difference.
Even though pay had increased for all, the negative gender pay gap remained unchanged from the previous year.
Labour councillor Josh Guilmant asked how often the council reviewed the situation and if officers were waiting to hear from lawyers about the risk levels.
Interim chief finance and property officer John Hooton said that the court process had yet to start.
When it did, he said, it would help the council to understand the full nature and number of claims and whether they were valid.
He said: “This will become clearer as those claims go through the process of court over the next couple of years.
“We are likely to see a court case in the autumn which will start to clarify this but, at this stage, we do not have sufficient information to be clear about the potential liabilities.”
Should the claims succeed, they could put the council at risk of having to issue a “section 114 notice”, effectively a bankruptcy notice, if the council proved unable to meet its financial liabilities.
The council currently held free reserves of £8.2 million – down from the minimum recommended level of about £9 million and lower than most similar councils.
The Labour deputy leader of the council Jacob Taylor said that, as a percentage of the budget, Brighton and Hove had one of the lowest levels of reserves – or working balances.
The council had drawn on its reserves to fund a budget shortfall before Labour won the last local elections, Councillor Taylor said, but this would be repaid early from last year’s underspend.
Important to differentiate between gender (ie social construct) and sex (biological fact) including for pay gaps that could bankrupt the council. Given the number of trans and non binary identifying people (according to health counts) in B&H that only risks skewing this data further. It would be pretty wonderful to think if there is a pay gap in B&H that it benefits biological women for a change, but given anyone can identify how they choose and the sex/gender data is now so corrupt, conflated and misrepresented it is difficult to see how anyone can make that judgement anymore. It would be interesting to know how many trans ‘women’ are in the women’s cohort and what pay they are on in comparison to both biological women and their male peers.
Considering the latest legal clarifications, it poses an interesting question.
The equal pay gap isn’t always about about gender it’s about paying the same rate for the equivalent level of work.
There are men working in what are seen as traditionally female roles such as carers, cleaners, shop workers etc who would have been paid less when compared to traditionally equivalent male roles where women working in those jobs would have received the same pay as male coleagues.
We have been and are being governed by people with zero practical experience of anything meaningful ie the Labour leftwing.
All they have is an ideology so out of step with reality that it is not only pointless but dangerous.
Thave never seen so many thick, stupid and ineffectual politicians in one place in my lifetime…….Starmer, Lammy, Millibland, Reeves, Ginger Ange, Badenoch, Stride, Cleverly and Ed Davey for starters.
Councillors (supposedly here for the public good) are just milking us for every penny.
…which has nothing to do with this article. Weird.
Especially as councillors and MPs get paid the same rate no matter their gender.
Interesting, so the auditor is saying the process of defending against the claims is a financial risk, not uplifting people to neutralise an alleged gender pay gap. I had a quick read of the latest gender pay report after reading this to see the situation at BHCC.
It’s important to note that this is not a straightforward complaint about men earning more than women in identical jobs; the report suggests that BHCC does quite well in this aspect. Really, it’s about valuing the work done by carers, cleaners, and school staff; roles predominantly done by women. Those are areas that could see improvement, according to the report.
Also worth noting is that the union were asked for details back in August 2024, as reported on this website, so it appears there is an element of bad faith negotiation and vexatious litigation tactics by the union. This is a weak strategy for its members. Tribunal would most likely refer to it as failure to engage, non-compliance with pre-claim protocols, or refusal to disclose material information, ultimately making a majority of these 1,600 claims unreasonable in their eyes, in my opinion.
Two separate issues on the risks though
The first is easier to manage and that is the ongoing pay levels and any increased costs arising from regrading staff / adjusting pay grades which would be managed as part of the annual budget cycle.
The main risk to the councils finance is the cost of any backlog claims and how those would be funded.
Lets say the cost of any regradings is £1m a year that is relativly easy to manage but a 10 year backlog costing £10m isn’t so easy and may require borrowing to pay out etc. And that is the rick the auditor is pointing out.
Of course the actual cost level won’t be known until the process is completed but there is nothing wrong in an auditor pointing it out and the council making provision for the costs.
And just because someone has made a claim doesn’t mean they are going to win it.
I’m not too worried about the apparent current gap where women are earning more than men at the council..What matters is that men and women are paid the same for the same job and in some categories there are simply more women working at the higher levels than men.
Even a small change in staff make up can have an impact on the apparent pay gap and it’s not a sign of their being anything wrong especially when incremental pay scales are used.
It’s amazing that the GMB found these claims only weeks after the KC investigation into bullying and abuse at the CityClean depot.
They then took months to even provide the Council with details of their claims.
The original Equal Pay legislation was there to deal with historic pay discrimination against women. This is now getting ridiculous and preventing the Council from raising wages in areas where there are staff shortages because the GMB will kick off every time.