Just before she left office, Jenny Watson, the outgoing chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, was uncompromising. Because of what she described as “the flood of pay claims brought recently against local authorities pushing the Employment Tribunal to breaking point”, she proposed the introduction of an unprecedented ‘moratorium’ on all new equal pay claims. Her proposals were reported on the front page of The Times on 21 September. The idea was to give companies three years in which to address any outstanding discriminatory pay issues, during the course of which they would be given immunity from litigation.
But is this talk of crisis overblown, and might the proposed remedy prove to be somewhat worse than the disease? If you look back over the last three years, the increase in equal pay claims going to tribunal is astonishing. There were 8,229 cases in 2004-05, 17,268 by the following year, and 2006-07 saw 44,013 equal pay cases, which is no less than a 155% increase on the previous year.
