The Shadow Welfare Secretary Yvette Cooper has claimed that 70% of the tax cuts in the June 2010 budget will hit women only.
In a gender analysis of the June 2010 budget, Yvette Cooper claimed that of £8bn net revenue to be raised by 2015, nearly £6bn will come from women and only £2bn from men. The report was commissioned by Cooper from the House of Commons, and carried out by the research department of the House of Commons Library.
The main changes underpinning these calculations focus on cuts of up to 40% in some public sector departments, including 9,973 nursing posts lost through recruitment freezes in the NHS, cuts to family benefits, housing benefit, budget changes to public sector pensions, and upratings to the additional pension.
The report claims that ’94% of child benefit recipients are women, so of the £975m saving from child benefit, it follows that 94% (£913m) is coming from women and the rest from men.”
The report also uses a proportional analysis based on previous data on Capital Gains Tax (CGT), claiming that, since some 27% of Capital Gains Tax receipts currently come from women, of the additional £925m of revenue expected from CGT, 27% or £249m will come from women.
Other budget changes include the switch to using the consumer price index to calculate benefits and tax credits, which Cooper’s report claims will bring in £5.8bn from women, but only £2.2bn from men.
Yvette Cooper pointed out that the June 2010 budget had “cut support for children more savagely than anything else so far, with billions of pounds being cut from child benefit, child tax credits, maternity support and child trust funds.”
