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.
