The chair of the Women’s Budget Group has criticised the Treasury for not publishing a comprehensive analysis of the gender equality impact of the budget, arguing that men would benefit far more from the income tax giveaway.
Professor Diane Elson, WBG chair and emeritus professor at the University of Essex, told the Treasury committee that 63% of the gains from changes in income tax would go to men and 37% to women between the tax years 2017-18 and 2021-22.
“That’s not really surprising because we know that men have higher incomes than women and a lot of women are already below the tax threshold and won’t benefit at all,” she said.
She noted that the Treasury had worked out the impact by gender of all tax measures, concluding that 30.6 million people would benefit – 58% men and 42% women.
But the failure to produce a full gender equality analysis of the budget – including changes to benefits and spending pledges – meant the UK government was “not really fulfilling the public sector equality duty,” she said.
“They’ve done a little bit of analysis but they didn’t publicise that and that didn’t make them rethink the measures,” Elson said.
She also noted that the £20bn spending boost for the National Health Service would mainly benefit women as they use the NHS more than men and largely staff the NHS.
Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said he agreed with Elson’s comments, adding that in households where men are the only earner it looks as though the benefit goes to the man but it might be shared between the couple.
He pointed out that the increase in the work allowance for universal credit would go partly to single parents who are largely women, and that the big increases in the national living wage in recent years had mainly benefited women.
