It is not nonsense. I challenge the Minister to sit in one of my surgeries and hear that it is not nonsense.
The Government have made £28 billion-worth of cuts affecting 3.7 million disabled people, and the additional caring responsibilities have fallen on the shoulders of women. It is the same with the cuts in social services—women take up the slack—and the pay cap, which hurts women more than men. Indeed, 86% of the Government’s cuts are falling on women. Labour Members are not the
only people who are saying that. In June, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights said that the Government’s changes adversely affected
“women, children, persons with disabilities, low-income families and families with two or more children.”
If the United Nations can see that, and if Labour Members can all see it, why can the Government not see it and do something about it? The best policies are evidence-based policies.
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How, for instance, have the Government’s policies affected people of colour? Research carried out by the Equality and Human Rights Commission showed that average losses in black households amount to about 5% of net income, more than double the figure in white households. It also concluded that lone parents lose about 15% of their net income—on average, £1 in every £6—compared with other families, who lose from nothing to 8% depending on how wealthy they are. How have the Government’s policies affected people working on low incomes? There are 8.9 million people in working households who live in poverty. That is a record to be ashamed of. It has been seven years! Even Scrooge would have seen the error of his ways by now.
The Government are failing, even on their own terms, to promote equality, fight discrimination in all its forms and introduce transparency. Equality audits should be carried out at the development stage of any policy. Once a policy has been implemented, there should be post-legislative scrutiny. That is good government. The Government should not be scared of impact assessments; they should embrace them, which is exactly what a Labour Government will do. They should not be denying that there is a problem. We hear that type of rhetoric from the Prime Minister every Wednesday. We tell her that there is a crisis in the NHS”; she says, “Oh no there isn’t”, and we say, “Oh yes there is.” It is like the Christmas panto every Wednesday, and not in a good way.
Having a detailed understanding of how policy choices exacerbate or eliminate inequality at every stage of the policy-making process is the key to tackling burning injustices and producing good policies. It is no good saying things that one does not mean. The only impact assessments in the 2017 Budget documents are the tax information and impact notes, also known as TINs. They contain only a sentence or two about equality impacts. I say to the Minister, and to the Chancellor, “Be less like the TIN man, and have a heart.” Let us do more than TINs. Let us have a full comprehensive equality impact assessment and publish it, so that we can make this country a fairer place for the many and not the few.
If the Chancellor and the Minister will not listen to me, or to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Women’s Budget Group, the Runnymede Trust or the House of Commons Library, perhaps they will listen to the Women and Equalities Committee, which was set up by the Prime Minister with a member of the Conservative party in the Chair. It has said that greater transparency is essential in order for the Government to demonstrate that they have fulfilled their obligations, and recommended that evaluations should be commissioned for the equality analyses accompanying all future spending rounds and
fiscal events. I hope that all members of that Committee will join us in the Aye Lobby today. After all, it was their work and their report that helped to generate this debate.
Before the Minister responds, I want to help him by dealing with some of the arguments that we expect to hear from him. The Government say that it is not possible to do a full impact assessment, but I say, in full pantomime muster, “Oh yes it is!” The Women’s Budget Group and the Runnymede Trust have done just that. One Minister misquoted what the IFS said in 2011. In fact, the IFS went on to describe ways in which the Government could fulfil their obligations with very little effort, and with just the will and the heart to do so. The Government have said that it is not possible to analyse the impact of changes in tax and benefits on women and men in couples, and I say again, “Oh yes it is!”
Analysis can assume income is shared equally; may I highlight one problem that Labour solved and the Conservatives have now recreated? The decision to pay tax credits to the main carer, rather than the main earner, was a decision made by a Labour Government in 1997, and it was based on evidence—evidence that money paid to women was more likely to be spent on children than money paid to men. Universal credit has just reversed all of that. If this Government conducted proper impact assessments, they would know this stuff.