Last year a leaked No 10 memo admitted the government had a problem with women and promised a new communications campaign to turn things around – but the admitted blind spot has got worse, not better – with last week’s autumn statement disproportionately hitting women harder than ever.
Despite repeated warnings from Labour, the Fawcett Society, other thinktanks and the experience of women across the country that the Tory budget is disproportionately impacting women’s incomes and lives, the chancellor has come back for more and once again is raiding women’s incomes to try and get the deficit down – a task in which he is failing through no coherent plan for jobs and growth.
House of Commons library analysis shows that women will be hit four times harder by the new direct tax, tax credit and benefit changes announced last week – with women shouldering £867m of the £1.1bn raised from the autumn statement – even though they still earn less and own less than men.
When added together with other changes this out-of-touch government has already announced to tax, benefits, pay and pensions since May 2010, this means women are being made to pay three times as much to bring the deficit down, by a cabinet with three times more men than women. The comparison could not be more stark with Labour’s shadow cabinet, and its representation of 40 per cent women, with Yvette Cooper, Harriet Harman and Rachel Reeves, among others, ensuring the needs of women are not forgotten. One Nation Labour is a plan for a fairer Britain where everyone has a stake and prosperity is fairly shared – and that includes between men and women.
The Telegraph reported on Thursday how many of the benefits being cut by the chancellor – like child benefit and child tax credits – go to the woman in the household, not the man. In fact, House of Commons research shows that 98 per cent of child benefit payments are made to women, and just two per cent to men. For a family which tends to pool the family income these cuts will hit the family purse hard. When it comes to the cash-strapped single mother, however, this latest set of cuts could be devastating – especially when considering a survey by Netmums conducted earlier this year which revealed that more than 70 per cent of families are financially ‘on the edge’, and that families teetering on the brink of poverty could face ruin if hit by further price increases or falls in their income.
It is no coincidence that this, the biggest attack on women for a generation, is happening under a government that does not understand women’s lives, and does not have women’s voices strongly at its heart.
There is always something unsavoury hidden away in the chancellor’s announcements, and the autumn statement was no different. In March in the small print of Osborne’s budget was the Granny Tax, hitting pensioners hard across the country. This autumn the chancellor has laid out plans for a Mummy Tax, with a real terms cut in maternity pay, effectively a £180 tax on working women. What makes it worse is that this is happening on the same day that those on the highest incomes get an average tax cut of over £100,000 – it is completely unfair.
The government claims to be targeting the workshy, but the reality is different. With the Mummy Tax they are targeting mums taking time out from work to look after their newborn baby. Evidence shows women on low income are less likely to take their full maternity leave because they can’t afford to stay at work.
Time and again women have been disproportionately hit by this government, and last week’s autumn statement was another blow to the pockets and lives of working women. Not only will the autumn statement further reduce women’s economic power, but in doing so it will reduce women’s influence in public and work life when combined with the highest rise in women’s unemployment in a generation.
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Seema Malhotra is the Labour MP for Feltham and Heston. She tweets @SeemaMalhotra1
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