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Welfare reform is a feminist issue

By Bernadette Meaden
March 8, 2015

On International Women’s Day, feminist organisations and campaigners who haven’t been active on austerity and welfare reform really need to have a rethink. Otherwise, to the millions of women around the UK struggling to survive, they could look as out of touch as the politicians.

Whilst getting Jane Austen on a bank note or more women into boardrooms is laudable, it often feels as if much of the feminist movement is ignoring the elephant in the room which is the discriminatory impact on women of government policies.

Since 2010, women have been disproportionately affected by austerity, through job losses in the public sector and cuts and changes to benefits. If the Conservatives win the General Election, this is set to continue. Only last month it was reported that under George Osborne’s freeze on tax credits and benefits, 75 per cent of the savings will come from women, only 25 per cent from men.

This is partly because many benefits are paid directly to women as the primary carers of children: Child Benefit, Child Tax Credits and the Childcare element of working tax credit are curently paid to the main carer, so inevitably when benefits are cut, women are hit harder than men.

Women are also, of course, more likely to be in a low paid job, and the increasing numbers of low paid, part time, zero-hours jobs which have characterised our economic ‘recovery’ do nothing to help their situation.

However, what feminists really should be shouting about is the fact that under Universal Credit, all household benefits will be paid to one individual, into one bank account, meaning that women who stay at home or work part-time may lose all independent income, while their partner becomes the main 'breadwinner'. Concentrating all the financial resources and power in the hands of one person in a household should surely be a matter of concern to feminists.

In February 2015 Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights published a report that said Universal Credit could leave women more vulnerable to domestic abuse, exposing them to financial control – a coercive form of domestic abuse in which men limit their partners' access to money.

Polly Neate, Chief Executive of Women’s Aid in evidence to the Committee said, "Domestic violence is characterised by perpetrators using all available means to exert control over their partner. Non-physical forms of domestic violence, such as financial and emotional abuse can be part of this ongoing tyranny of abusive and controlling behaviour and in most cases women experience years of different kinds of abuse before they feel able to seek help. It’s therefore essential that the Government act to minimise the risks of financial abuse when introducing Universal Credit."

Even in households where abuse does not take place, concerns have been expressed about paying all the benefits to one person. As a report from Glasgow Council for the Voluntary Sector pointed out in 2013, "Worryingly, less household income could be spent on children as women are more likely to spend money on children’s needs than men."

Iain Duncan Smith has often stated that one of the aims of Universal Credit is to change people’s behaviour.

Monthly payments will teach people to budget as they would if they were in work, receiving a monthly salary. This fails to understand that many of the low paid, low grade jobs people are forced to take actually pay weekly or fortnightly.

Paying rent direct to the tenant instead of the landlord will teach people responsibility. This fails to understand that for a person who is struggling and knows they may be tempted to dip into the rent money, asking for the rent to be paid direct to their landlord is actually the most responsible thing they could do. Under Universal Credit they will have to get into rent arrears before this happens, which doesn’t seem to help anybody.

And paying all benefits to one person, probably the man of the household, seems to be an attempt by the DWP to impose a traditional family model onto households where this may be dangerously inappropriate.

For this and many other reasons, welfare reform and austerity need to be placed right at the top of the feminist agenda.

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© Bernadette Meaden has written about political, religious and social issues for some years, and is strongly influenced by Christian Socialism, liberation theology and the Catholic Worker movement. She is an Ekklesia associate and regular contributor. You can follow her on Twitter: @BernaMeaden

This blog first appeared on the website of
#NewApproach which advocates the abolition of the Work Capability Assessment and a new approach to Social Security

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