SWBG blog

Reaction to the Draft Budget 2022-23

Responding the Budget Statement for 2022-23 on Thursday 9^th December 2021

This draft budget contained some welcome commitments to tackle poverty and inequality including the increase and expansion of the Scottish Child Payment; freezing higher and top rate income tax; and a pay rise for those working in social care.

These commitments are important steps that will have an impact on women, particularly women on low incomes.

But it’s an opportunity missed to make transformative change in how care is viewed and delivered in our community and leaves question marks over funding local services. Care is the backbone of society. Yet, because it is overwhelmingly carried out by women, it is undervalued and has suffered from chronic underinvestment. Further increasing the minimum wage floor for social care staff, providing funds for local recovery and delivery of services, and financially supporting those providing unpaid care are all steps that need to be taken to deliver a caring economy.

Adult social care

We welcome the decision to set a minimum income floor for staff in the social care sector. However, set at £10.50 this can only be viewed as a first step. After years of underfunding & undervaluation of the social care workforce significant further investment is needed within this highly gendered sector. Alongside increased wages delivery of Fairwork principles within the care sector must be prioritised to properly value and respect those who deliver care across the country.

The wage commitment comes alongside a rise in overall funding to Health and Social Care. While the sums of money involved may sound large this comes at a time of unprecedented challenge in recovering from the pandemic and following years of underinvestment in social care. A further cash injection to support social care delivery now is needed alongside long-term planning for the National Care Service. There is need to deal with urgent staff shortages and recovery of services that were reduced through the pandemic.

There is little in the budget for unpaid carers, despite the numbers of unpaid carers rising sharply during the pandemic as well as the demands placed by caring responsibilities when many services have shut down. Support to unpaid carers and those receiving care is urgently needed including increasing the value and eligibility of Carers Allowance to provide support and protect carers from poverty, as well as access to local services including respite care.

Just transition

Care economy jobs need to be considered fundamental to transitioning to a greener, wellbeing economy and need adequate funding and training.

As necessary commitments are made on how Scotland will tackle the climate crisis in this Budget more needs to be done for Scotland to champion a feminist just transition. There is a risk that the unprecedented investment in decarbonising economic activities will widen labour market gender inequality if a gendered analysis is not built into the planning process. In yesterday’s budget the focus on infrastructure and energy spending, adapting our lived environments and retrofitting homes missed an opportunity to compliment this investment with investment in green social infrastructure.

A comprehensive just transition policy must also expand socially necessary and low-carbon jobs, such as those in the caring economy. Care jobs are green jobs.

Continued support to the Green Jobs Fund must be matched with commitments that this fund can also work to tackle inequality. This could be done by including a portion to specifically support people from areas of socio-economic deprivation, women, lone parents, those belonging to minority ethnic communities, refugees, disabled people, carers and young people to train for and get green jobs.

Social Security

The pre-announced good news on the doubling of Scottish Child Payment was confirmed through the draft budget. This is a vital step towards tackling child poverty in Scotland. We know that to end child poverty, we must solve women’s poverty. This action will be crucial to protect women’s incomes, make progress towards interim child poverty targets, and to mitigate against the withdrawal of the £20 uplift to universal credit.

Funding to deliver disability assistance was committed in this budget an important step in moving this support to devolved delivery. As roll out of this payment moves forward it must be delivered through a human rights-based system that provides dignity and respect to those who receive it.

Tax

We welcome the Cabinet Secretary’s announcement to freeze higher and top rate tax as a method of continuing the use Scotland’s income tax powers to deliver progressive taxation.

There is no continuation of the Council Tax freeze, which may come as a relief to cash strapped local authorities but with it a risk to low income families that raising council taxes will hit them hardest. Efforts to support lower-income households will need to be stepped up in order to protect women's incomes and set Scotland on track to meet its child poverty targets. Scotland needs a fairer form of local taxation and this budget had an opportunity to announcement measures to start investing to agree alternative options. Reform of local taxation and options for local revenue raising should be agreed over the course of the 2022-23 budget year, to deliver a more progressive tax system across all taxation within devolved powers.

Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement

The Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement (EFSBS) is an important statement of intent and commitment to equality analysis within the Budget process. Capacity and support must be provided at an early stage in the budget process to ensure that the EFSBS is resourced to provide quality, transparent analysis of the equality impacts through the budget in an accessible format.

Alongside this building understand and knowledge of the structural causes of inequalities must remain a priority for the Scottish Government. The Equalities Budget Advisory Group has provided a set of recommendations for Government to take to continue to improve how equality, gender and human rights budgeting is delivered in Scotland. These recommendations need support from leadership and capacity to deliver.

One additional Equality Impact Assessments has been published, for Public Sector Pay Policy, alongside the draft Budget. We’d like to see the publication of all related Equality Impact Assessments to allow for transparent scrutiny of the budget decision making process.

For more details on these themes and our pre-budget recommendations please see our Pre-Budget Briefing.

Why women's voices need to be part of the budget process

Each year the budgetary process starts in a mooted fashion with the process of pre-budget scrutiny. Just before the Scottish Parliament went into recess the newly formed Finance and Public Administration Committee launched its consultation seeking your views on Scotland’s public finances in 2022-23, how they have been affected by COVID-19 and how the next Scottish Budget should address the need for a fair and equal recovery.

When the group of eight men and two women, who make up the Finance Committee, return to Parliament it’s important that they hear a diversity of experience in responses to this consultation. To hear the different economic experiences of people across our society. Often there is an assumption that budgets are gender neutral and effect everyone similarly, but we just need to look at the spotlight that COVID-19 shone on inequalities to know that is not true.

The pandemic has affected us all but it’s not affected us equally. Women, those belonging to minority ethnic communities and disabled people are economically the hardest hit by the Covid-19 crisis and the risk of deepening existing inequalities is high. Women have been on the frontline of the Covid-19 crisis, making up the majority of health and care workers and the majority of workers at high risk of exposure to Covid-19. Other sectors which have a predominantly female workforce, such as hospitality, have been harder hit by the impact of lockdown and ongoing restrictions of social distancing, with risk of unemployment or reducing working hours remaining high.

This is on top of the fact that women are more likely to live in poverty at any stage of their life than men, Scotland has a 13.3% Gender Pay Gap and 85% of those who are deemed ‘inactive’ in the labour market due to caring responsibilities are women (Statistics take from Scottish Government 2020 Scotland’s Gender Equality Index).

The next budget has a lot of work to do to turn the tide on inequalities so it’s not surprising that at the Scottish Women’s Budget Group we want to make sure women’s voices and concerns are part of that process. National budget’s affect our lives everyday, having the potential to make things easier or more difficult depending on the spending decisions. A budget process that is open, transparent and gives space for participation makes way for a fairer process.

Join us in sharing your views with the Committee

Individuals can response to the Committee consultation the consultation is open until 13 August.

Join us for a policy dialogue event to inform the SWBG response alongside members of SWBG to the consultation on Monday 9 August.

Producing the Living Gender History Podcast

Members of SWBG took part in the Living Gender History Podcast episode The Politics of Care in Scotland – listen to the episode

Guest blog by Eliska Bujokova

When the idea of producing a podcast was first brought up at one of our Centre for Gender History virtual meetings during the pandemic, I was immediately intrigued. I think more then ever, a lot of us historians felt disillusioned with our work. Archives were closed and we simply couldn’t do what we do best, that is get stuck in our sources and forget about the passage of time. In fact, the passage of time became a source of existential dread, second only to the one caused by our inability to comprehend, analyse and historicise the events we lived through. The podcast served us all as a much-needed project, as well as a way to contribute to a discourse that is current, as living in and for the past seemed more irrelevant than ever. It became a medium of making our own work, interests and expertise speak to a broader audience than is generally the case for early career academics. The composition of our collective has changed a number of times and so have some of our ideas about the message we intended the podcast to convey, but I personally think that what we have produced in the end is an enthralling series of insightful dialogues as well as a great start of an on-going collaboration between the project’s producers.

The two episodes produced by Anna McEwan and myself focus on care, which is a rather interesting subject to be studying in a time like this. Habitually, I research care in the eighteenth century. When I started my research two years ago, care debates were still on the margins of the mainstream, mostly featuring in texts of feminist economics, care ethics and the study of global labour markets. As a result of the pandemic, this has changed beyond recognition. Care has become largely debated by mainstream commentators, policy makers and the general public, with the notion of a caring economy gaining momentum. Though, as many have pointed out, the idea of putting care and dependency at the centre of social and economic analysis has in many instances been co-opted by empty performative gestures, and the much needed conversations about what a caring economy actually means were often obfuscated by the much louder clapping for the NHS. The first of our two episodes on care hopes to look past the calls for a feminist new deal and think about what care in Scotland really looks like in the here and now, and what the plans for reforming the care regime currently in place will be able to deliver. In the second episode, we go back to the beginning of the pandemic and talk to a number of carers as partners, parents and teachers and think together about what caring really means in the everyday and how the pandemic has made us rethink and reconceptualise the nature of responsibility for care.

My own takeaways from this project are manifold. I have thoroughly enjoyed the conversations with our guest speakers, including the members of the Scottish Women’s Budget Group, who have been so generous with their time, insights and personal experiences. I have worked through and in spite of my fear of all things technical and learned a thing or two about the practicalities of research impact. I have also been able to find a new route for utilising my research that feels current and conversational, qualities often lacking in academic work for someone as exceedingly verbal as myself. I hope this rather personal account of the podcast production may offer an interesting behind-the-scenes of what I hope to be a long-lasting project, as well as an invitation for our listeners to raise questions, comments and subjects of interest they may wish to hear us engage with in the future. I hope that you enjoy the podcast as much as I enjoyed taking part in its making, and that the message of the series, that is, that gender history can be a living subject bringing together the academy, community, activism, politics and personal lived experiences, is made manifest in each of our episodes.

Listen to the Living Gender History podcast – members of SWBG took part in the latest episode - The Politics of Care in Scotland.

6 challenges to embrace in building a caring, green recovery

Last month we launched a paper ‘Challenges for 2021 and beyond’ ahead of the Scottish elections. We called on Scotland’s political parties to respond to the challenges and to commit to invest in an economy that cares. Here we share the six key challenges the politicians must grasp if our recovery is to tackle existing inequality and the climate crisis, while working towards a gender equal economy.

Build a feminist green recovery – so that responding to climate change can tackle existing inequalities in Scotland

This year Glasgow will host the COP 26 climate talks. The recovery from Covid must also set us on a greener path but this path must recognise the need to tackle inequalities as we reduce our carbon emissions.

Core to tackling climate destruction is valuing life-sustaining livelihoods, including the care economy. This means a new deal for care workers whether in social care, unpaid care, childcare, teaching, or health care. It’s time that care jobs are recognised as green jobs.

Invest in care – to build a system that puts wellbeing at the centre and invests in the people who are supported by it and the care workforce

Care work is overwhelmingly carried out by women and is a key sector in our economy. Yet it is undervalued and has suffered from chronic underinvestment. This lack of investment must be recognised as both a cause and consequence of an unequal society.

Perceptions of care work have changed through the course of this pandemic and now is the time for significant investment in our care services and those who work in them. Building services with the participation of those who use them, with local flexibility underpinned by a human rights approach and a clear gender analysis.

Transform the worlds of paid and unpaid work – to provide time for both women and men to care

During the Covid-19 crisis the reliance on unpaid care work has increased, with social care and support packages cut, reductions in respite care and a closure of childcare and schools. Each one of these changes and closures has impacted women most – women who were already undertaking the majority of unpaid care work pre-pandemic, and who undertook even more throughout 2020-21.

It's time for ambitious change that seeks to redistribute caring and unpaid work responsibilities between women and men, and between the family and the state.

Create a caring social security system – that provides people with a dignified safety net when they need it

Social security should provide everyone in society with a safety net and support when needed. Yet the Covid-19 has highlighted how inadequate the provisions are and this hits women hardest as women have a greater reliance on social security.

The challenge for Scotland in the next parliamentary term is creating a caring social security system and using the powers available in Scotland to increase incomes and lift people out of poverty.

Develop the tax system to promote fairness and equality – using revenue raising powers to tackle inequality

How government generates income through taxes has an important role to play in tackling inequality. Decisions about how best to raise public funds through tax can affect women and men differently. In Scotland, as across the UK, the unequal taxation of income from wealth and income from work represents a tax break for wealthy men.

As we recover from Covid-19 we need to see Government decisions that build fairness into our tax system, and that work together with public spending decisions to tackle inequality.

Deliver gender mainstreaming in policy development – putting theory into practice

In order to deliver on each of the challenges outlined above those making budget decisions in Government must ensure that in each decision recognises the different needs and experiences faced by different groups of women and men.

There are tools that should be used in government to make sure this happens, ensuring Equality Impact Assessments are completed in budgeting and policy decision making processes is a vital piece of this challenge.

These are our six key challenges to policy makers and politicians, and they are challenges that will remain after the election. We need to hear far more from all of the candidates in this election on how they would respond to these challenges. We would encourage everyone to raise them with their candidates at hustings or directly.

Click here to read our full Challenges Paper

Contact us if you’d like to get more involved