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Birmingham City Council to sell NEC to settle equal pay bill
The settlements are for female staff including home care workers and school cooks who were paid less than men for work of equal value. Some men have also been included in the payouts.
The council has already paid £450m in equal pay settlements, and has raised £76m in the past couple of years through the sale of council houses, land and office buildings.
A schedule of payments has been agreed with trade unions acting for the women – £120m is due in 2014 and a further £154m in 2015, according to council officials.
The group brings in £2bn a year and supports the equivalent of 29,000 jobs, the council said.
Sir Albert Bore, leader of the Labour-run council, said the key purpose of establishing the NEC Group had been to drive economic development and regeneration. “This has been achieved,” he said. “But now the NEC Group has reached a point in its evolution where it needs to be able to adopt the financial disciplines of a private, rather than a council-owned, company to enable the next stage of strategic development.”
The sale would have gone ahead regardless of the council’s financial issues, he claimed.
The council said it intended to retain “claw-back rights” over potentially valuable land at the NEC site, next to where the HS2 Birmingham interchange could be built.
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