Engendering Economic Policy: The Women's Budget Group

Abstract

In these days, when feminist theory has been replaced by gender theory and activism by the practice of deconstruction, it is refreshing to find a group of women academics and voluntary sector campaigners coming together to engage with day-to-day issues of economic and social policy. Such is the London-based Women's Budget Group (WBG), which has set itself the task of creating a dialogue with treasury officials and ministers. Many of the issues have not changed much since 1974, when the Women's Liberation National Conference adopted the 'fifth demand' - legal and financial independence for women - and the London Women's Liberation Campaign for Legal and Financial Independence (commonly known as the 'fifth demand group') started working on the tax, benefit and pensions policies that treated husband and wife as a breadwinner-dependent couple with no need of separate incomes. The style may have changed: the fifth demand group used to alternate its more business-like meetings with consciousness-raising sessions, and go away together for weekends and days out in the country, whereas the WBG does much of its communicating by e-mail. The fifth demand group never even contemplated employing anyone or applying for funding or recognition; the WBG has administrative backup from the Women's National Commission, which is autonomous but located within the Cabinet Office, and at present has funding from the Barrow Cadbury Trust to employ a part-time project manager. The fifth demand group met in the living rooms and kitchens of suburban flats and collective houses; the WBG holds its meetings in the corridors of power in Whitehall, thanks to the Women's National Commission. The fifth demand campaign was an eclectic mixture of the presentation of arguments to the ruling establishment and more populist agitation. It gave evidence to parliamentary select committees, to official inquiries and to the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth; it produced an accessible and forcefully argued pamphlet and discussion pack--'The Demand for Independence'--that circulated widely among feminist groups (no longer available, but see London Women's Liberation 1979); it launched the YBA Wife campaign that attracted a flurry of media attention and an enormous post-bag in 1977. The WBG, on the other hand, has the ear of government; it has regular meetings with treasury officials and some nowadays with treasury ministers; it produces a detailed critique of the annual pre-budget report and a response to each year'sbudget; periodically it holds public meetings that attract back-bench and front-bench MPs, social affairs journalists, social policy experts and people active in related campaigns (most notably the one reported in Robinson 1998). In the intervening decades, much of what the fifth demand group campaigned for has been achieved. Husbands and wives are now taxed separately and the married man's tax allowance has been abolished. Married women can no longer opt to make more limited national insurance contributions in return for more limited rights to benefits. People who are married or cohabiting still cannot claim means-tested benefits separately from their partner; but at least either one of them can now be the claimant, rather than just the man. So the assumption that women are dependent housewives has been gradually eroded, but is far from being destroyed.