Budgets and Fiscal Events

Government budgets and fiscal events, such as autumn statements, are used by the chancellor of the day to outline the government’s plans for taxation and spending and economic priorities for the upcoming financial year and beyond.

Women and men are situated differently in the economy, largely due to the additional unpaid care carried out by women. This means that economic policy and decisions about allocation of government budgets impact men and women differently.

But women remain underrepresented in public life, so policy makers often do not take women’s needs into account. This can lead to policies that don’t work for women.

One way to challenge this is through Gender Responsive Budgeting. GRB means thinking about what impact spending and revenue raising decisions will have on gender equalities and to adopting policies that will bring about greater equality between women and men.

HM Treasury, like all government departments, is obliged to have due regard to equality under the Public Sector Equality Duty contained in the 2010 Equality Act. The best way to do this is by carrying out equality impact assessments (IEAs) of its policy and funding decisions. We believe that these assessments should be published in the interests of transparency and accountability.

However, in recent years the Treasury has not published meaningful IEAs. When other government departments do, we rarely find they have adequately recognised the economic and social inequalities women face, nor do they capture the intersecting inequalities faced by different groups of women or other disadvantaged groups.

The Women’s Budget Group grew out of the work of feminist academics and activists collectively carrying out their own assessments of the impact of government budgets on gender equality from the 1980s and we continue their legacy to this day.