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Public spending cuts hit women the hardest

Paul Treloar
forum member

Head of Policy, LASA

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Total Posts: 842

Joined: 6 January 2011

A new report, Unravelling Equality: A Human Rights and Equality Impact Assessment on the spending cuts on women in Coventry, shows that cuts in Coventry are likely to hit women harder in a number of ways: The report has been published today by the Centre for Human Rights in Practice at University of Warwick and Coventry Women’s Voices.

Amongst the changes looked at are:

• Tax and benefit changes will cost women in Coventry nearly £30 million. The cost to men will be less than half of this. This will increase the number of women living in poverty in Coventry.

• There are over 10,000 families headed by a lone parent in Coventry. 92% of lone parents are women. Lone parents will be particularly hard hit by many of the cuts and other changes that affect women including; cuts to childcare tax credit, cuts to housing benefit, closures to childcare services and a charge of up to £100 and 7-12% of maintenance if they use the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission.  These will reduce the disposable income of lone parents in Coventry and make it harder for them to find employment.

The report examines cuts to jobs, tax credits and benefits, funding for education, health and social care budgets, legal advice and women’s voluntary organisations. It concludes that the spending cuts will increase inequality between women and men and may seriously damage the human rights of some women.

Unravelling equality (pdf file)