Council faces judicial review over cuts to factory employing disabled

Birmingham City Council faces legal action over proposed funding cuts to a supported factory employing disabled persons.

Claimant law firm Public Interest Lawyers last week sent a pre-action letter to Birmingham warning of a potential judicial review of the council’s decision on 10 December, which is expected to reduce the workforce at ‘Shelforce’ from more than 60 to 13.

The firm claimed that the cuts were likely to lead to “widespread compulsory redundancies” and the winding up of the factory, whose roots are said to date back to the 1830s.

In its letter, PIL said the cuts were disproportionate and argued that the council’s decision-making process had breached its equalities and consultation duties.

It acknowledged that Birmingham had conducted a lengthy consultation exercise in 2012. “However, the options for Shelforce’s future that were put forward bore little resemblance to the decision sealing Shelforce’s fate in December 2012,” it argued.

The law firm claimed that throughout the consultation employees were assured that they would be redeployed within the local authority, but that assurance was withdrawn in the final decision.

PIL added that Birmingham had “failed to assess the disproportionately heavy impact that its decision would have on the disabled people who have heavy financial, social and emotional reliance on Shelforce”.

It argued that the equalities assessment which accompanied the December decision failed to identify that it was the impact of the new redundancy proposal which required assessment.

Daniel Carey, a solicitor at Public Interest Lawyers, said: “Shelforce has been a lifeline to disabled people in Birmingham for decades. It is too valuable to cut on the basis of a deeply flawed consultation exercise and an equalities assessment that failed to even correctly identify the decisions it was supposed to be assessing.”

A Birmingham City Council spokesperson said: "We are still consulting with employees and trades unions as to Shelforce's future structure and no decision has been made. We believe therefore that this law firm's action is premature and we will be responding to them accordingly."