What do women want from this government?
contribution by Scarlet Harris
The leaked government documents this week exposed the coalition’s fear that they are losing the support of women voters. They’re right to be concerned.
Gavin Kelly’s excellent analysis in the New Statesman shows that government policy is indeed alienating women voters, particularly working class women.
So far, so good. Acknowledging that government policies may not be going down well with women is a good starting point. Where the author of the leaked memo starts to go wrong though is when possible remedies are suggested.
Suggestions such as giving women “personal budgets” for maternity care to “force the pace on choice in maternity” are ill-conceived (no pun intended). With maternity units closing up and down the country and a chronic shortage of midwives, women’s choices in maternity care are dwindling. Personal budgets will do nothing to reverse this.
A personal budget is no use to a woman whose local maternity units have all closed and who has no option but to give birth at a hospital miles from home with too few midwives to ensure the level of care she needs.
A personal budget will not afford any more choice to a woman who wants to give birth in a midwife led unit but, due to NHS cuts, only has access to a hospital with an understaffed maternity ward.
David Cameron made a pre-election pledge to recruit an extra 3,000 midwives. Implementing that pledge would do more for women’s “choice in maternity”, let alone maternal mortality rates, than a cash handout.
There is also a suggestion that a website for women to anonymously disclose pay would be a step forward for equal pay. Surely what we need is for more employers to disclose and monitor progress on equal pay, rather than individual employees having to work it out for themselves based on anonymous testimonies on a website?
How about defending abortion rights, halting the savage cuts to public sector jobs, ringfencing Sure Start funding, increasing the childcare element of tax credits, committing more funding to ending violence against women and girls, safeguarding the NHS, strengthening, rather than weakening employment rights and equality legislation?
This is the kind of “blue sky thinking” that might win a few women’s votes.
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Scarlet is the TUC’s Women’s Equality Officer based in the Equality and Employment Rights Department.
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Reader comments
A useful note, Scarlet. To add in a little more detail on “the childcare element of tax credits” (and adding in the family element to the equation, a woman-friendly Tory government might want to focus on:
a) increase the % of childcare costs eligible for coverage under the childcare element of WTC back to 80% (or increase it above 80%), given that the govt cut it to 70% from April 2011;
b) reverse the decision, effective from April 2011, to increase the “withdrawal rate” of the family element (where income is above the upper £40,000 threshold) from 6.67% to 41%. While this affects mid-higher income families, it is directly discriminatory, as it is stopping people from returning/going to work (this, and a) above, is my experience, based on numbers of children withdrawn from childcare over the summer in the social enterprise family centre I run, and the reasons given).
c) Reverse the decision, effective from April 2011, to remove the Baby element of CTC, where families with child aged under one got £545 added to the basic family element. Bizarrely, this seems to the opposite in terms of thinking to their new blue-sky thinking about frontloading cilhd benefits for younger children.
It sounds like you, as a lefty, would like the rightish government to do more lefty, (and it has to be said, heavily bureaucratic), things. Perfectly understandable but it’s rather unlikely that they will do so. As for the “personal budgets”, if they can be spent on non NHS midwives as well then this should increase the total number available, which sounds like a good thing.
[2] May we take it, Falco, that you would like to see the NHS abolished? Do you perhaps also agree with those American right-wingers who also consider private sector insurance-based health-care schemes too bureaucratic, and think that people should pay for their health care as needed, out of savings?
@ Mike – While I support universal healthcare, I don’t believe that the NHS model is a very good one. The European model is, in my experience, very much better when compared to either the US system or the NHS.
Re: “Do you perhaps also agree with those American right-wingers who also consider private sector insurance-based health-care schemes too bureaucratic, and think that people should pay for their health care as needed, out of savings?”
Erm… no. Nor do I see any reason why you might think I should be radically anti-insurance any more than I might believe that you start your day by saluting a picture of Chairman Mao. As I’ve said above, I don’t think much of the US system although it could be significantly improved by allowing inter-state insurance rather than the current restricted oddity.
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