Equal pay bill soars to £120m

Single status legislation to equalise pay for male and female workers is already costing cost taxpayers in the Black Country and Staffordshire more than £120million, it was revealed today.

The bill is likely to rise still further as councils thrash out settlements with their staff. Councils in Sandwell, Walsall, Dudley and Wolverhampton are still trying to implement single status and the only authority in the region that has reached a deal so far is Staffordshire County Council.

There, council taxpayers have forked out an eye-watering £47m in back pay going back up to six years.

The county council has also created a new pay model which applies to all its current workers, which cost an extra £47m to implement over threeyears – £13.9m for 2008-09, £15.6m this year and £18m in 2010-11.

Despite the Single Status Agreement being announced by the Government in 1997, union Unison says 75 per cent of council staff nationwide have still not reached a deal.

The two strands of Single Status are entirely separate. One is back pay, which council workers who were employed by a local authority after 1997 are entitled to ask for, even if they have since left.

The other is the pay model for current workers, with each local authority now obliged to review every employee's salary and make changes, with union agreement, so certain lower paid people get more cash.

Some workers face cuts in pay, but many more will get rises, and the overall bill is met by council taxpayers.

The only other authority apart from Staffordshire to have agreed a total for back pay is Wolverhampton, where £33m has been paid to current and former workers like cleaners and school dinner ladies.

The deal was financed by a Government loan to be repaid over 20 years.

A deal has yet to be reached on a new pay model for current workers.

Dudley says it is considering taking out a £40 million loan to cover the costs of back pay, and that no deal has been reached on the new pay model for the workforce.

Walsall Council has yet to agree on back pay or a new pay model, but Unison says it will not accept any losers from the negotiations.

In Sandwell, £10m has been put aside for the new pay structure and council chiefs say they are hoping a new model will be settled on by July, but it has already been delayed several times because unions do not want people to suffer pay cuts.