If neoliberalism entrenches the economic, social and structural status quo and denies the state intervention that is imperative to bring change towards equality, with this government, it is not only an economic dogma but a total frame of reference. That is the only realistic explanation for the overall lack of awareness of women’s interests we found through the Labour Women’s Safety Commission, which showed 32 per cent cuts in women’ services from 27 per cent centrally enforced cuts to local authorities; 230 women on an average day being turned away from refuges; and half of domestic violence survivors to be denied legal aid to secure their family rights.
Yesterday’s Osbornomics makes this gender obliviousness look wilful. Not only have the ConDems had the inequality of their earlier budgets brought forcefully to their attention by the now famous Fawcett court case followed by a formal inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but it is widely known that 73 per cent of their earlier savings were made by net cuts to women’s income compared to 27 per cent from men. However, despite all that and Cameron’s apparent recent panic that women are disproportionately opposed to his government, amazingly there is no worthwhile gender impact assessment of yesterday’s budget and worse still, no amelioration of this government’s anti-women financial bias.
Indeed there are new inequalities. Child benefit was frozen for three years in 2010 and according to the Women’s Budget Group has reduced the real income of women by 10 per cent. Although more men are higher rate taxpayers than women the majority of lone parents who are higher rate taxpayers and who will fall of the cliff edge as child benefit is cut for that sector, are women. Irrespective of the new taper, a couple whose combined income is almost £100, 000 will lose less than a one parent family earning just over £50,000.
The £18 billion of welfare cuts already announced, many of which have not yet been implemented, and £10 billion more to come by 2016, women will be hit massively more – twice as hard as men, say the Women’s Budget Group since benefits make up on average one fifth of female income compared to one tenth of male income and these changes will more than undermine any benefit from lifting the personal tax allowance threshold, a change that gives nothing anyway to those who are under the earnings level for tax, 73 per cent of whom are female.
Female unemployment is at its highest for 25 years and is growing at twice the male rate so that the brunt of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s anticipated losses of 710,000 will continue to come from women. 64 per cent of public sector workers are women, so the public sector pay freeze disproportionately affects women, mainly on lower incomes too. Moves to break down national wage bargaining and pay people who live in less expensive areas lower salaries will gratuitously cut more women’s salaries in the deprived regions than men’s.
Now Osborne has turned to pensioners to execute the single biggest tax take in the budget. It is no surprise that his move to freeze their tax allowances has been dubbed ‘the Granny Tax’ because of the greater numbers of people over 65 who are women. It will cut an average of £259 a year from the income of half of pensioners and give Osborne £3billion over the next ten years, with which to fund reducing the top rate of income tax from 50p to 45p. Just in case one wondered, there are far fewer women in that income bracket than men.
The government has yet again produced a budget without investigating how its measures affect men and women differently, despite a statutory duty to do so and this early assessment demonstrates that it contains more of the same disproportionate impact on women that they have inflicted before. As we have seen recently, women’s safety is being imperilled by cuts, policy change and legislation; and this budget demonstrates a further deliberate, or at least reckless, dramatic and dangerous reversal in progress towards equality between women and men.
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Vera Baird is chair of Labour’s Women’s Safety Commission and a former Labour MP and solicitor-general
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Photo: Ewan McIntosh