Keep the home fires burning! After the apocalyptic vision of post-Brexit Britain revealed last week in the leak of Operation Yellowhammer, we learn that the government will spend £4m on “local resilience forums” across England (and £1.7m for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) supporting Brexit preparations for public services.
The reasonably sane response might be – what public services? Central government funding for local government will have fallen by 56% in the 10 years to 2020. Or, to put a more human face on it, 1.4 million older people are not receiving the home care they need, 155 women and 103 children are turned away by refuges every day and hundreds of libraries, youth services, Sure Starts and day centres are closing weekly.
At the current rate, the main job of resilience forums will be putting up yet more shutters. All of which affects both men and women but no change is gender neutral in the damage it inflicts. Women have already paid a far heavier price from austerity and, deal or no deal, worse is to come.
So who will speak up? If women counted, what kind of an economy might we have? Wednesday 18 September sees the 30th birthday of the Women’s Budget Group (WBG), an independent thinktank that is now part of a global network of feminist economists who are growing in influence, particularly in places where there is an insightful leader such as New Zealand, with Jacinda Ardern. In May, her government introduced a wellbeing budget. Billed as the first in the world, it allocated millions to child poverty and narrowing the inequality gap. The International Monetary Fund predicts that the New Zealand economy will grow by 2.9% next year.
In the UK, it was the sight of John Major, the then chancellor of the exchequer, carrying his red box on budget day in 1989 that prompted a group of feminist economists, trade unionists and activists to set up the WBG. Its purpose was to demonstrate what a non-gender-blind approach to economics might look like and to encourage women to take a bigger part in the economic debate. It’s our future too.
What do gender-blind policies mean in practical terms? One example: transport. The cumulative cuts in fuel duty will cost the exchequer £9bn a year by 2020. The Treasury says this is gender neutral: both men and women drive. But men are more likely to own cars, drive cars with higher fuel consumption and go longer distances. At the same time, public transport, on which women rely more than men, has received so little investment that the sight of a bus in rural areas is a rare event.
Another example: unequal pay means that no single woman on median earnings can afford to buy or rent an averagely priced house in any region in England. Average rent takes 43% of a woman’s median earnings, 28% of men’s.
And a third: we have a growing crisis in care because this precious commodity is valued so poorly. Between 2005 and 2014, the number of hours of unpaid care rose by 25% from 6.5bn to 8.1bn hours a year – that’s mainly women’s work – at the same time as debt and low wages mean women have to hold on to employment, however insecure.
“Women are disproportionately affected … as a result of structural inequalities which mean they earn less and have more responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work,” says Prof Diane Elson, chair of WBG’s commission on a gender-equal economy that reports next year. “It doesn’t have to be like this. Our positive vision for an alternative economy puts care and wellbeing of people and planet front and centre.”
Under New Labour, urged on by feminist ministers, WBG had a major influence on, for instance, working tax credit and the need to consider the gender impact on policies (a statutory duty easily ignored). Since then, the road has become rockier domestically. The European Union, however, has passed several beneficial laws for women’s employment.
So what next? WBG argues not for “a budget for women” but for “an economy for human beings” that works more effectively and fairly. One day, let’s hope “women’s issues” are extinct, replaced by an understanding that pro-equality policies work more effectively both for women and men, for social cohesion and for the environment.
“Classical economics is based on the independent man who works full time and is in control,” says Mary-Ann Stephenson, WBG’s director. “But life isn’t like that. We are all interdependent. It’s part of what it means to be human. We will all give or receive care at some time in our lives. So we need a system in which care is a fundamental part of the economy and the unpaid economy is fully recognised as having value.”
In 1988, Marilyn Waring, a former New Zealand MP, wrote If Women Counted, criticising the use of gross domestic product as a system that “counts oil spills and wars as a contributor to economic growth, while child rearing and housekeeping are deemed valueless”. A woman in Africa who toils 18 hours a day on the land and for her family is classed in manmade economics as “unoccupied”. Why, Waring asked, does water going through a pipe have a market value but not water carried on a woman’s head?
In the same vein, the WBG argues that attention should be paid to what it calls social infrastructure – for instance, investment in social care – in addition to investment in roads and rail. This isn’t a “women’s issue” – it makes economic sense. If the UK invested 2% of GDP in the care sector, it would create 1.5m jobs; the same investment creates 750,00 jobs in construction.
“Can you imagine the nation’s annual budget becoming a realistic description of wellbeing of the community and its environment, a reflection of real wealth and different values?” Waring wrote in 1988.
The members of WBG not only imagine just such a society, they pursue it with the kind of academic rigour and economic expertise that reveals the real price we all pay for continued injustice and inequality – and how there is a better alternative. May WBG have the best of birthdays.
• Yvonne Roberts is a freelance journalist, writer and broadcaster
