The first female Chancellor in Britain’s history will deliver her first budget this week with a promise that there will be “no return to austerity”. Rachel Reeves has also committed to making the economy work for women; this is an historic moment, and the budget will be one of her first significant opportunities to deliver for women’s equality and on ensuring a better future for us all. This requires serious investment in our public services and in our social security system.
The first Labour Government in fourteen years has inherited an economy in bad shape and facing multiple crises. Public services are on their knees after over a decade of underinvestment, there are persistent gender pay and earnings gaps, a decrease in living standards, and rising levels of child poverty.
Women have been made worse off by these crises. Take the decrease in living standards. Cuts to public services and social security have made most of us poorer than we were pre-2010. But women were impacted harder, losing proportionately twice as much as men from austerity cuts. Economic inequalities widened as a result, not just between women and men but between poorest and richest, with the poorest women seeing a decrease in their living standards of 21%, compared to the wealthiest men who lost just over 2%.
