Britain’s second-biggest city effectively declared itself bankrupt on Tuesday, shutting down all nonessential spending after being issued with equal pay claims totaling up to £760 million ($956 million).
Birmingham City Council, which provides services for more than one million people, filed a Section 114 notice on Tuesday, halting all spending except on essential services.
The deficit arose due to difficulties paying between £650 million (around $816 million) and £760 million (around $954 million) in equal pay claims, the notice report says.
The city now expects to have a deficit of £87 million ($109 million) for the 2023-24 financial year.
Sharon Thompson, deputy leader of the council, told councilors on Tuesday it faces “longstanding issues, including the council’s historic equal pay liability concerns,” according to the United Kingdom’s PA Media news agency.
Thompson also blamed in part the UK’s ruling Conservative Party, saying Birmingham “had £1 billion of funding taken away by successive Conservative governments.”
“Local government is facing a perfect storm,” she said. “Like councils across the country, it is clear that this council faces unprecedented financial challenges, from huge increases in adult social care demand and dramatic reductions in business rates incomes, to the impact of rampant inflation.”
“Whilst the council is facing significant challenges, the city is very much still open for business and we’re welcoming people as they come along,” she added.
A spokesperson for UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told reporters on Tuesday: “Clearly it’s for locally elected councils to manage their own budgets.” The spokesperson added that the government has been “engaging regularly with them to that end and has expressed concern about their governance arrangements and has requested assurances from the leader of the council about the best use of taxpayers’ money.”
The council’s leader John Cotton elsewhere told the BBC that a new jobs model would be brought into the council to tackle the equal pay claims bill.
The multicultural city is the largest in central England. It hosted last year’s Commonwealth Games, a major sporting event for Commonwealth countries, and is scheduled to hold the 2026 European Athletics Championships.
They mention it like 4 times in the article, but don’t explain what the hell “equal pay claims” even are.
This article goes into it in more detail
Women in female-dominated roles such as cleaners and caterers had complained that they were missing out on bonuses given to staff in male-dominated roles, such as refuse collectors.
That’s because modern journalists are hardly anything more than stenographers most of the time.
For non-UK readers: UK councils have limited revenue-raising powers compared to local government in other countries, and rely on 3 sources of income:
- Central government grants
- Council tax (on residential properties)
- Business rates (on commercial properties)
This amounts to c. 7% of the total UK tax base, versus c. 32% collected locally in Germany or 50% collected locally in Canada.
Central government grants were cut by 40% in real terms between 09/10 and 19/20 from £46.5bn to £28.0bn.
Council tax has gone up 30% over the same period, but it can’t go up more than 2% annually without passing a referendum (unlikely). Some councils in dire straits have recently been allowed to raise it 5%.
Local authorities have been underfunded for over a decade. Other UK councils which have already declared bankruptcy, either through running out of money, or through losing vast amounts of money in risky schemes attempting to replace missing central funding:
- Northamptonshire
- Hackney
- Slough
- Thurrock
- Croydon
- Woking
Equal pay is something women have had to fight for.
In this case,
the court found hundreds of mostly female employees working in roles such as teaching assistants, cleaners and catering staff missed out on bonuses which were given to staff in traditionally male-dominated roles such as refuse collectors and street cleaners.
Women in the UK only gained the right to equal pay in 1970.
Well, it sounds like if they hadn’t violated the law by deciding that women didn’t deserve equal pay, and hadn’t underpaid what seems to be a lotof women for a long period of time (seriously, almost a billion dollars in claims they have to pay out?!), then it seems like they wouldn’t be having this problem.
I’m not saying that underfunding government isn’t an overall issue, but it really seems like the immediate issue is that they decided to systemically underpay people for an extended period of time. And that’s on them.
Did they make an equal pay bill that comes from tax dollars instead of the offending employers??
