Still not a good budget for women

“Women are still bearing the brunt of this government’s failed austerity agenda.”

The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, presented the 2017 Spring Budget on 8 March 2017.

Remarking on the budget announcements Hammond made, the co-director of the Women’s Budget Group, Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson  said: “We welcome the announcement of an additional £2billion for social care over three years. Yet it is not enough, with the funding gap estimated to reach £2.8billion and £3.5billion annually by the end of the Parliament.

“The social care crisis hits women hardest. Not only are the majority of paid and unpaid carers women, but the majority of those with care needs are women too.

“While Hammond focused on older people blocking beds in the NHS, we know that there are around 1.86 million people over the age of 50 with unmet care needs, the majority of whom are women.

“Tackling this requires more funding than was announced today and a new approach. We look forward to government’s Green Paper later in the year for further details on its proposed strategic approach for addressing this crisis.

“The £30 million in measures announced ‘to mark International Women’s Day’ is purely a token gesture.

“The additional £20 million for domestic violence services for the next two years, while welcome, is insufficient compared to the scale of the problem.

“Sexual violence services are excluded from this additional funding, even though we know that these services are severely stretched.

“It costs £70million annually to run Rape Crisis England and Wales and they currently have a £10million budget shortfall, yet will not see any of this additional money.

“The Chancellor also announced £5million for women returning to work and £5million for celebrations to mark the centenary of women gaining the vote.

“This will make no difference to the daily lives of ordinary women that have lost the most, and gained the least, from changes to taxes and benefits.

“We know that women in the poorest 20 per cent of households by 2020/21 will be losing £1,600 a year on average as a result of changes to taxes and benefits since 2010.

“The Chancellor’s announcement on the treatment of employees and the self-employed is welcome. In particular we welcome the move to equalise parental rights for the self-employed.

“However,” she continued, “by focusing on the contributions paid by the self-employed, these measures do little to disincentivise employers from pushing individuals into bogus self-employment.

“We urge the Chancellor and the government to look at this as a matter of urgency as it particularly affects women, who are also then denied access to the protections of employees.

“The Chancellor and Treasury,” she pointed out, “have again failed to undertake a robust equality impact assessment of the Budget, despite their obligations under the Equality Act and calls from the Women and Equalities Select Committee to improve its reporting of equality impact.

“Without such an assessment, the government cannot fully understand the impact of its decisions on different groups, including impact, or how to minimise unintended negative impacts.

And she concluded: “Given the failure of the government to carry out an impact assessment, the Women’s Budget Group will publish an independent distributional impact assessment by income, gender, and ethnicity tomorrow.”

And an analysis published the day after the budget by the Women’s Budget Group and the Runnymede Trust showed that by continuing with planned freezes and cuts to in-work and out-of-work benefits the poorest women will be £1581 worse off a year, on average, by 2020 compared to if policies in place in 2010 had continued.

Key findings of the cumulative distributional analysis of tax and benefit changes since 2010 are that:

Women are hit harder than men across all incomes groups, with BAME women particularly hard hit.

Asian women in poorest third of households will be £2,247 worse off by 2020, almost twice the loss faced by white men in the poorest third of households (£1,159).

White men in the richest third of households, by contrast, lose only £410.

Black and Asian lone mothers stand to lose £3,996 and £4,214, respectively, from the changes, about 15 and 17 per cent of their net income.

And tax and benefit policies of this government are more regressive than those of the Coalition government, with men in the richest 50 per cent of households actually gaining from tax and benefit changes since July 2015. Men in the 10 per cent richest households are £564 better off.

Stephenson said: “This reveals that the government’s aim to help the ‘just about managing’ is incompatible with the Chancellor’s decision to ‘continue with our plan’.

“The 1.8 million working families receiving tax credits are the ‘just about managing’, but rising inflation and a freeze in tax credit rates means a sharper fall in their real terms income.

“The Chancellor’s decision to continue with the decisions of his predecessor to cut social security for these low income families, at the same time as cutting taxes, is effectively a transfer from the purses of poorer women into the wallets of richer men.

“The rise in personal allowances does nothing to help those who earn too little to pay tax, 65 per cent of whom are women.”

And Sarah Champion MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, speaking on 9 March, said: “Yesterday the Prime Minister and Chancellor talked up the significance of International Women’s Day yet their warm words have amounted to nothing.

“Calls for a budget that works for women have been ignored.

“Women are still bearing the brunt of this Tory government’s failed austerity agenda – with the 86 per cent impact figure on women remaining unchanged since last year. Things are just as bad as ever for women under this Tory government.

“Labour calls on the government to urgently publish analysis of the true impact of their budgets and spending announcements on women and to explain how they intend to reverse this disproportionate impact.

“Under a Labour government, all economic policies will be gender audited to ensure that we have an economy that works for all.”

Lorraine Winson’s petition for ‘a Spring Budget that work for women’ is still open. To sign it, click here.