Backdated equal pay claims

Case 1: The facts

This judgment is part of a long-running equal pay claim brought by women who were employed by a local council. Following the introduction of “single status”, the council carried out a job evaluation in 2004 in which women’s jobs were rated the same as jobs done predominantly by male employees.

Equal pay claims can be backdated for up to six years, and the women claimed that they should be able to claim equal pay prior to the evaluation date of 2004, because they had already been doing their equivalent-rated jobs before then.

The ruling

The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) held that the women could not claim equal pay for the period before the job evaluation was completed in 2004. The fact that the jobs had been put in the same pay scale did not necessarily mean that they were of equal value, the EAT said; this may just have been a “sensible approach” adopted in order to create simplified pay scales. As a result, compensation could not be claimed prior to 2004.

Bainbridge & others v Redcar & Cleveland BC UKEAT/0424/06 and UKEAT/0031/07 ([2007] IRLR 494)