To solve Birmingham abolish the Equality Act
We may have mentioned this before but it’s one of those things worth repeating until people understand it:
England’s supposed second city has never looked, felt or indeed smelt worse. Piles of rubbish line the streets, cat-sized rats have allegedly taken over and the uncollected bins emit a potent odour.
It offers an unfortunate metaphor for Labour’s legacy in Birmingham after 14 years in power.
It’s not, in fact, Labour’s fault. Or at least not Labour as in those elected in Birmingham at fault. This is a national problem.
Labour’s fate in May may well be decided by its track record on bins.
Bin workers started striking last March after the council proposed role changes and pay cuts. One year on, a solution between Unite and the town hall has not been reached.
It means parts of the city have been blighted with piles of uncollected waste that have been left uncollected for six or seven weeks.
To give the pencil sketch. The Equality Act incorporates the concept of equal work for equal pay. Or even, equal pay for work of equal value. The people to decide which work is of equal value being the judges. Who then decided that getting out there at 5 am to empty the bins was work of equal value to the labour performed by the school dinner ladies and the classroom teaching assistants. As the former were overwhelmingly male, the latter two female, this was illegal discrimination on the grounds of sex and so compo all around.
This is one reason - only one mind - for the effective bankruptcy of the council, that compo bill. But it also causes a different problem. Which is that the wages necessary to tempt people into the 5 am bin thing are rather higher than those required for making pink custard - or ensuring pink custard gets eaten not thrown. But lifting the wages of all three groups - there are vastly more dinner and school ladies than binmen - to the level required to gain a useful number of binmen is alarmingly expensive.
An attempted solution was to offer title changes, bonuses and the like to the binmen. Which did work but back come the lawyers insisting that, well, no, it works but it’s coach and horses through the Equality Act and therefore…..you know, don’t. At which point the binmen go on strike. For they’re no longer gaining the bonus, the exalted title that allows the extra pay and so on - this is the basis of the claim that they’re losing £8k a year and so on.
In order to gain the desired number of binmen Birmingham - under this current legal dispensation - needs to pay the binmen the 8k plus perhaps a bit. But, in order to be able to legally do so it has to pay all the dinner ladies etc the same extra amount. Which is ludicrous, bankrupting and so on but is, according to some insane measure, equality.
The solution to this is to abolish the Equality Act and the ludicrous, bankrupting and insane even idea of work of equal value. That then sidesteps the idiocy of thinking that judges are the correct determinant of such.
As so often the solution to a problem of governance is simply less government.
Tim Worstall