It is a pleasure to take part in the final day of debate on this Finance Bill. We have had a lot of debate during the past few weeks. The hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds), the Minister and I have spent quite a lot of time together in the Committee Room, on not only this Bill, but the customs Bill. It is good to be here again to talk about this. It is a great way to start talking about equalities, particularly in respect of this new clause put forward by the Labour Front-Bench team.
The new clause is incredibly important, because the way the Government and previous Governments at Westminster have done Budgets has not been particularly transparent and has not resulted in people knowing what the effects of all the policies will be. I have said before that this is a good new clause and I am delighted to support it on behalf of the Scottish National party. I wish to highlight a number of things in it and to make more general comments about transparency and the processes the Government use to create Budgets and make tax law. The new clause talks about various things, including an analysis of the impact on the different protected characteristics.
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Let me focus on just one of those characteristics, as the issue of age is incredibly important. A number of decisions the Government make on tax policy have a differential impact on people of different ages. We have spoken in this Chamber on a number of occasions about the generational divide that exists. We are seeing “generation rent”, with millennials and those who are younger facing a very different housing situation from those in generations that came before. Therefore, any tax changes that happen affect that group of people differently from how they affected those in the previous generation when they were the same age. It is important that any analysis undertaken by the Government considers the generational divide and examines the impact on not only that group of millennials and younger people, but people of state pension age. It must consider the impact on them of any changes to taxes that are coming through.
The hon. Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) mentioned the issues relating to women, and it is clear that a major gender pay gap remains. I recognise that the Government have ensured that companies have to publish this information. That is really important, but the publications I have seen so far from companies have caused me even more concern than the situation we were previously in. One company recently produced a gender pay report that stated that men in the organisation were paid significantly more than women and that this was not an equal pay issue because the men were overwhelmingly doing higher-paid jobs. This was a travel company and men were the pilots whereas women tended to be the cabin crew; 95% of this company’s pilots were men and 80% of its cabin crew were women. That is still a major issue, because women are finding it very difficult to become pilots and men are not finding it that easy to become cabin crew either. There is a real issue to address. Even though I welcome the fact that
these data have been published, this has highlighted more structural, institutional issues that need to be solved, as well as simply those relating to equal pay. Any impact analysis that the Government carry out needs to ensure that it takes into account all these things.
Let us look at some of the decisions the Government have taken previously, such as the changes made on the marriage allowance. I welcome the positive changes that are being made to the marriage allowance in the Bill, but the creation of the marriage allowance disproportionately has a negative impact on single female parents. That is still a major concern for the SNP. We still have real issues with the marriage allowance and do not think it has been properly thought through, because of the lack of fairness in that system.