The Single Status Agreement is a national collective agreement on the pay and conditions of service for approximately 1.5 million local government service employees.
The Agreement was originally signed between Local Government Employers and the trade unions, Unison, Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU – now Unite), the General Municipal and Boilermakers (GMB).
The main purpose of the Agreement was to harmonise the terms and conditions between ‘white collar’ and ‘blue collar’ local government employees that included a single pay spine for both sets of employees in what became known as the Green Book. To do this, part of the Agreement was to introduce job evaluation schemes to cover all of the job roles covered by the Agreement. A consequence of implementing the job evaluation schemes is that it made clear the extensive gender pay inequality between the heavily gender segregated roles in local government that had already started to emerge in employment tribunal cases such as Ratcliffe and Others v North Yorkshire County Council: HL 7 Jul 1995.