Labour’s first budget in 14 years was a historic day for women, we’re told. Rachel Reeves is the first female Chancellor in 800 years to hold the role. Ahead of her speech, in which she detailed upcoming changes to government taxes and expenditure, Reeves shared a video of herself holding the iconic big red box of monetary decisions aloft outside 11 Downing Street. She captioned it, on X: “Today is the first time in our country’s history that a budget will be delivered by a woman. For every young girl watching, let this be a sign that there should be no ceiling to your ambitions.”
But does her individual success as one woman do anything to help to smash the glass ceiling above women and girls’ heads? What about the women who don’t really see themselves having a seat in an office, let alone the table? The women stuck in cages of poverty? The women trapped in the confines of trauma? Does it help liberate them to achieve their own ambitions?
My best bet is no.
Reeves' first budget was certainly headline-making. While sold to investors and moneymen as a plan to “rebuild Britain”, it included a slew of taxes on the uber-wealthy to help ease the strain on “working people”. Landlords now have added stamp duty, farmer-landowners have to pay inheritance tax equitably, private jet users set are to splurge an extra £450 per person per flight and rich expats losing their cherished ‘non-dom’ status, meaning they’ll actually have to pay tax here to live here.
Tackling violence against women and girls starts in schools.
You’d think, with all this in place, that the most vulnerable women would benefit from this budget. And undoubtedly, there are some fantastic policies incoming. The expansion of free childcare hours and breakfast clubs in schools will help millions of working mums. Investment into the NHS may also help women who are currently more likely to be waiting longer for surgeries than men. And with women making up 58% of those earning minimum wage, Labour's 6.7% increase will see an uplift to their finances. Plans to spend and additional £233 million on homelessness could see more women – who make up the majority of those living in temporary accommodation – finally given somewhere to call home.
But, the gaps are glaring – and indicate that despite there being a woman at the top of the country’s coffers, decisions are made in a business-first, women-later order.
First, there’s the the 3.6million women fighting for state pension equality, who were not mentioned in the budget – they continue to fight for compensation over historic rises to the state pension age, which has primarily affected the retirement finances of 1950s-born women. The two-child cap on benefits didn’t get a mention either, meaning that this Cameron-era rule is here to stay.
But simmering underneath all of this is Labour’s pledge to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) – a promise that was particularly notable in Keir Starmer's leadership campaign – so where, I ask, is the funding for that?
The rise of platforms like ‘Vinted sluts’ begs the question: is anywhere on the internet safe for women?
We’ve all read the horrifying stories of women’s rape and murder at the hands of violent men. Men who, if they get to court, try to declare themselves powerless over their own desires – as if this affliction happens at random, as if women ever offend at anything like the same rate. And perhaps we’ve been trained to be resigned to it all. But the government made a commitment – the first of its kind in the UK – and that commitment means cash.
Rape Crisis CEO Ciara Bergman said today, in response to the budget: “Our network of specialist and community-based Rape Crisis centres have been struggling with acute and chronic underfunding for decades. Austerity, covid, the economic crisis and being asked to do much much more with much much less isn’t fair and isn’t sustainable.”
She added: “We welcome the government’s commitment to halving violence against women and girls in a decade and between us, there is immense will and skill and commitment to helping to achieve that, but we cannot even contemplate taking a seat at the table unless we know we can keep our doors open and our lights on.”
Meanwhile, domestic violence charity Women’s Aid has outlined their concern that Labour's aims to dramatically reduce VAWG was not explicitly mentioned in the autumn budget. The organisation has continually called for a minimum funding settlement of £516million to support specialist domestic abuse services; but the only mention of domestic violence in the budget is in reference to specially-trained officers in police control rooms. A good thing, but not the vast funding needed.
Isabelle Younane, Head of External Affairs at Women’s Aid, said: “With no explicit mention of violence against women and girls (VAWG) or domestic abuse in the Chancellor’s speech, and a failure to commit to new funding on tackling VAWG, we are concerned about the ability of government to meet its important manifesto commitment. Without adequate investment in the specialist services that support survivors by helping them to rebuild their lives free from abuse, this pledge will be impossible to deliver.”
Male violence against women and girls shouldn’t have to exist, but it does. It also shouldn’t have to be framed as an economic problem in order to get a government to fix it, but it is.
There’s the missed days of education and work due to trauma and stress. The NHS appointments for swabs, STI tests, abortions, stitches, broken arms, smashed-in faces. The housing of women who are no longer safe to live with the man who harmed her. The PTSD obscuring women’s ability to function on a day-to-day. Police, courts and prisons’ time and money spent on trying to, and in so many cases, failing to, address these crimes. Domestic violence was estimated by the former government’s Domestic Abuse Commissioner to cost the UK economy £78 billion as of 2023. Sexual violence cost, in 2017, an estimated £8.46 billion a year, say the Women’s Budget Group. The UK is effectively paying for a violence epidemic, and it’ll have to invest in ending it, too.
Scope is calling on the government to listen to disabled people and fix the broken benefits system.
And yet the Home Office, the department leading the work to tackle violence against women and girls, faces cuts from £6billion to £5.2billion. Where will these cuts fall? Upon extra training for police into how to resolve domestic violence? On civil servants doing research into patterns of offending?
The devil’s in the detail; Reeves' only mentions of women in her budget speech were in reference to her own role. While we can hope Labour will do better than its predecessors and that feminists thrive within its ranks, you can never be certain.
Hey, I get it – I sympathise with anyone trying to balance the books in favour of the little guy (and gal). But ultimately, when financial times get tough, women’s rights are too often seen as extras, like putting the icing on the cake when the flour isn’t in yet. It’s a shame they don’t come baked in.
