Coventry City Council faces renewed legal fight over equal pay claims
Thousands of workers join new challenge against pay discrimination
A new legal challenge has been launched over equal pay at Coventry City Council.
The GMB Union, representing workers across the city council, today announced it was reopening equal pay claims after what it called “unacceptable” delays from the local authority.
It claimed hold-ups in resolving the issue could add tens of millions of pounds to the final settlement bill.
The move will see thousands of workers given a further opportunity to add their name to the union’s legal challenge against Coventry City Council for the historical pay discrimination faced by the city’s women workers.
The new comes after talks aimed at finding a negotiated settlement to the discrimination collapsed earlier this year.
Alice Reynolds, GMB Organiser, said: “After years of unacceptable delays, Coventry’s women workers have had enough.
“They’re demanding settlement of this historical wrong; an injustice which saw women workers systematically under-paid compared to their male co-workers.
“We’re demanding an apology and for the council’s top brass to get back around the table with a plan to settle this.
“These new claims, and every additional day they remain unresolved, increase the potential cost the Council may ultimately have to pay.”
In March, it was revealed that the council had set aside £27 million of taxpayers’ money to deal with the financial impact of settling equal pay claims from female employees.
Hundreds of staff have lodged claims since 2022, backed by Unite the Union and GMB Union. The claims are focused largely on the benefits received by staff in the male-dominated bin collection service, where workers are allowed to finish their shift early and go home if they have finished all the rubbish collections.
Those in roles typically done by women, such as care workers and social services, said they were not offered similar terms and were therefore treated unfairly.
The city council’s Budget for 2026-2027 confirms it has set aside £9 million a year for the next three years – amounting to £27 million in total – to deal with potential liabilities arising from the equal pay dispute. But it’s thought the council could face a final equal pay bill of more than £30 million.
A Budget report stated: “Given the significant uncertainty around whether a financial obligation exists, or the value of any obligation, we are not at this point able to make any accurate financial assumptions in the medium-term financial strategy. We are however, acting prudently with a strategy of building reserves should a liability be the eventual outcome.”
Councillor Richard Brown, the Cabinet member for Strategic Finance and Resources, told the BBC in March this year: “There is a financial risk and I think it’s one of the reasons that we’re really prudent about this, we’re forward-thinking and you have to identify what your risks are and that is part of it. I’ve got no ballpark figure in mind, we’ve got some claims in, there could be more claims in.”
The Local Democracy Reporting Service has approached Cllr Brown, who retains his Cabinet role after the local elections led to Labour forming a minority administration, for an update.
A Coventry City Council spokesperson said earlier this year: “There was an equal pay preliminary hearing held on 2 March, with a further two preliminary hearings taking place in June and September ahead of the full hearing which is set for 2 November.
“A preliminary hearing is part of the standard tribunal process in readiness for the full hearing. The tribunal process commenced some time ago and a lot of work has been done to prepare for the hearing including careful financial planning for a range of outcomes.”
The Local Democracy Reporting Service has asked Coventry City Council for a comment on the latest legal challenge.
The council has already said it is confident it won’t end up in a similar position to Birmingham, where the authority issued a Section 114 notice that it was going bankrupt in 2023, partly as a result of equal pay claims initially believed to be worth up to £760 million. The final total liability was just over £250 million, paid out in December 2025.
The amount – with individual payouts ranging from £5,000 to £50,000 – was significantly less than the council’s original estimate, which led to criticism of Birmingham’s financial management.