Women take the UK cuts to court
Writing in the Guardian, veteran feminist writer and commentator Beatrix Campbell has usefully provided an all-you-need-to-know account of the battle lines being drawn between the UK Government and women’s rights campaigners, as the true impact of the coalition’s budget cuts begin to dawn.
As the dust from this summer’s budget settled, Bea reports that the Treasury were ‘stunned’ to learn that their traditionally sacrosanct document was the subject of an application by the Fawcett Society for a judicial review – on the grounds that its impact was inherently sexist.
Their legal case centres on the 2006 Equality Act, which imposed a legal duty on governments and public bodies to give “due regard” to the impact on women of all their policies and services, to promote gender equality and to mitigate policies and practices that will have an adverse effect on women.
And it seems that our sisters at Fawcett did indeed have a case, for nearly three months later, the government admitted that it did “not hold an Equality Impact Assessment for the June 2010 budget”.
To make matters worse for the coalition, former Treasury Minister Yvette Cooper MP did some digging around of her own and – bolstered by some facts and figures from the neutral House of Commons library – found that the burden of the initial budget cuts shouldered by women taxpayers was a staggering 72 per cent.
The commotion around the Fawcett Society’s actions have certainly had an impact and this week’s follow-up to the budget, the Comprehensive Spending Review, was this time accompanied by an Equality Impact Assessment. Victory for women at last?
Commenting, Fawcett Chief Executive Ceri Goddard says: “We are pleased that our action has provided a wakeup call that the Treasury is not above the law on equalities matters, regardless of the economic situation we are in.”
But, crucially, she added that she is concerned that the Equality Impact Assessment “is only partial and almost flippant in its lack of detail. The Treasury has explicitly chosen not to undertake any detailed consideration of the impact of benefit cuts, job losses or the slashed local authority budget – the three areas the Fawcett Society identified as particularly harmful to women’s future economic independence and financial security.”
So, not quite time to put away our placards yet…