Food For Thought (17/02/16)

Here's a letter I wrote to Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, way back in 2014.

Now this was widely publicised at the time and may well have helped knock some sense into Labour-run North Lanarkshire Council given that a partial settlement of the Council's outstanding equal pay claims followed quickly, as the New Year got underway in 2015.

But as we approach the Scottish Parliament elections in May 2016 and with so many equal pay issues still outstanding, maybe the time is ripe to put North Lanarkshire's behaviour back up to the top of the political agenda. 

Let's see if we can get Holyrood MSPs (and Westminster MPs for that matter) to put their weight behind a campaign for an independent inquiry into North Lanarkshire's behaviour in relation to equal pay over the past 16 years.  

28 November 2014

Dear First Minister

Gender Equality and North Lanarkshire Council

I followed with great interest the events leading up to your election as Scotland's new First Minister, in particular your comments about the importance of gender equality as a way of promoting social justice.

I have a long-standing involvement in equality issues and for the past 10 years I have acted as spokesperson for Action 4 Equality Scotland which has been leading the fight for equal pay in Scottish local government. Before that I acted as Unison's Head of Local Government and chief negotiator in Scotland and one of my responsibilities was to deliver the landmark equalities agreement in the shape of the 1999 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement with the purpose of sweeping away many years of historical pay discrimination against tens of thousands of low paid women's jobs.

At the moment I am heavily involved in the campaign for equal pay in North Lanarkshire Council which is proving to be just as stubborn and short-sighted an opponent as South Lanarkshire Council, its close neighbour. South Lanarkshire Council denied the existence of any gender based problems with their local pay arrangements for the best part of 10 years and refused to disclose vital information relating to the pay of traditional male and female jobs. A long and hard FoI battle with South Lanarkshire ended in a hearing before the UK Supreme Court in 2013 (at a cost of £200,000 to the public purse) which the Council lost decisively in a unanimous judgment. This finally forced the release of the pay information I had requested some three years earlier. 

So after being in complete denial for years South Lanarkshire Council finally came to its senses and negotiated a settlement of all its outstanding equal pay claims. This was reported in the press at the time as costing the Council over £70 million, ironically after describing my original FoI request as 'vexatious'.

The position of North Lanarkshire Council is very different, but there are striking similarities as well, in particular over how stubbornly and unprofessionally the Council has behaved. In 2007 North Lanarkshire reached an interim settlement of some of its outstanding equal pay claims using the introduction of a new Job Evaluation Scheme (JES) as a cut off date for settlement; the logic being that the new JES allegedly addressed the blatant discrimination and deficiencies inherent in the Council's old pay structures. 

Sadly, this proved not to be the case because North Lanarkshire went on to assimilate all the traditional male jobs on to the new pay structures on the basis of their old earnings, entrenching and compounding the historical pay discrimination. In addition, the Council's treatment of various female dominated jobs, for example Home Carers, has been shown to be wrong and discriminatory, yet this belated admission came only in 2014 after a full 7 years  of insisting that their grading assessments and the pay of the women's jobs were accurate and fair - and no less favourable than the men.

North Lanarkshire Council is now in a giant hole of its own making and this is the same Council which has been very heavily criticised in the press over the introduction of a performance 'bonus' scheme for the Council's most senior and highly paid officials, while the rest of the workforce has been subject to a policy of public sector pay restraint.

My purpose in raising these matters with you, as First Minister, is to invite the Scottish Government to use its powers under the Equality Act to launch an investigation into North Lanarkshire Council's behaviour. My reading of The Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties) (Scotland) Regulations 2012 suggests that the Scottish Government can intervene and is able to do so under Clause 11 of the Statutory Instrument which says:

Duty to consider other matters

11. In carrying out its duties under these regulations, a listed authority may be required to consider such matters as may be specified from time to time by the Scottish Ministers. 

In my view, Scottish Ministers should intervene and require North Lanarkshire Council to explain why it has not assessed its risks properly or made adequate provision to meet its equal pay liabilities, despite the wealth of information available to the Council from its internal and external auditors. I understand that North Lanarkshire Council is seeking to raise funds from the private sector by selling off public property to meet the costs of equal pay, whereas other councils in Scotland previously approached the Scottish Government for financial assistance by seeking extra borrowing consents.

I think it's fair to say that North Lanarkshire has been behaving very irresponsibly with public money over the past 10 years and now seems out of control, perhaps because the same people who got the Council into this terrible mess are still running the show over equal pay.

In my opinion, what is needed is an injection of independent scrutiny to consider the Council's handling of equal pay from 2006/07 onwards and I hope Scottish Ministers will consider using their powers under the Equality Act to intervene on behalf of thousands of low paid women workers in North Lanarkshire who have been waiting all these years to see justice done over equal pay. 

I am in the process of calculating a figure to illustrate the additional cost of this unnecessary delay between 2007 and 2014 and would be happy to share this information with you and/or your officials.

Finally, can I take the opportunity to congratulate you on your appointment as First Minister and for achieving a 50/50 gender balance in the Scottish Government's Cabinet which, in my view, puts the Westminster Government and Westminster Parliament to shame.  

Kind regards

Mark Irvine